Geza exits the world stage: No generation owns the nation and the unfinished work of liberation

Blessed Runesu Geza, known to many as Comrade Bombshell, died in the early hours of 6 February 2026 at a cardiac hospital in South Africa. A war veteran of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle, he later emerged as an outspoken political figure, known for his public criticism of the post-liberation state and its leadership, including Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Reader, Geza left behind a difficult record and an unavoidable question. The liberation struggle was fought not only for political sovereignty. It was about substantive freedoms, economic justice, racial equality, and popular control over national resources.

It was also about liberal jetties, one person, one vote. Human rights. Freedom of movement, assembly, and expression. These were not Western add-ons. They were intrinsic to the struggle itself.

This understanding sits within a wider anti-colonial tradition articulated by Thomas Sankara, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Brian Raftopoulos. For them, independence without liberty and economic transformation was not liberation. It was an unfinished revolution.

In Geza’s later critical speeches, this original promise re-emerged. It speaks directly to Frantz Fanon’s warning in “The Wretched of the Earth” that the postcolonial bourgeoisie would inherit the colonial state only to mimic its extractive logic, replacing racial domination with elite predation.

As Fanon observed, the national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European settler, converting the state into an authoritarian site of private accumulation rather than popular emancipation.

Mimicry, the imitation of the colonial without transformation, replaces liberation. Geza’s anger, beyond his personal experience of exclusion, was directed at this outcome.

A state captured by families, financiers, and political brokers. Hollowed out from within, yet still speaking the language of liberation.

Honesty, however, requires clarity. Geza was not only a later critic of postcolonial betrayal. He was also part of the ruling political machinery that enabled it.

As an insider within ZANU PF, he participated in an authoritarian political economy shaped by elite accumulation and prebendal politics. His role in the November 2017 transition that removed Robert Mugabe and installed Emmerson Mnangagwa also placed him squarely within what Ralph Miliband described as the circulation of elites within the state.

These were moments of political reconfiguration that altered leadership while leaving the underlying structures of power and accumulation intact. This was not an aberration.

It reflected a broader pattern in post-liberation states, where former revolutionaries became managers of systems increasingly detached from the emancipatory aspirations that once legitimised them.

What partly distinguished Geza in his final phase was not innocence, but public reckoning. “I have since apologised for my role.” This apology matters. It operated as a political rupture within a system built on silence.

In postcolonial authoritarian settings, apology is rare because it unsettles entitlement and fractures elite solidarity. Power is sustained not only through coercion but through silence.

In this moment, Geza broke with what Nicos Poulantzas described as the structural selectivity of the state, where actors are rewarded for conformity rather than reflection.

This move also resonates with my argument in “Intra-Party Cohesion in Zimbabwe’s Ruling Party after Robert Mugabe”, where silence functions as self-preservation and voice carries material and political risk.

Reader, this is not just theory, as Geza paid a price for breaking that silence. He fled to South Africa while being actively hunted by the state and died there in exile, pursued for the very voice he had chosen to exercise.

By publicly naming business figures, families, and networks implicated in corruption, Geza disrupted a political culture dependent on silence, euphemism, deniability, and collective amnesia.

People understand theft when it has surnames.

Naming functions as an anti-plutocratic indictment, but it does not erase past complicity. Rather, it reintroduces agency, responsibility, and blame into public discourse. Apology, in this context, is not a claim to redemption. It is an act of withdrawing moral consent.

Geza’s later interventions align with a broader political economy diagnosis. They point to the transformation of the postcolonial state from a developmental and redistributive project into one organised around access, proximity, and extraction.

Early nationalist imaginaries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America imagined the state as a vehicle for national development and popular uplift. Over time, this gave way to what Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle described as neopatrimonial rule, where formal institutions coexist with personalised power and patronage.

In such systems, politics is less about ideology or programme than about access to state resources. Geza’s language reflects this reality. Power is organised around who gets in and who is kept out. In this sense, his intervention reinforces my earlier argument that succession within ZANU PF has never been about ideas, but about access.

Geza did not exit the world’s political stage as a neutral figure. He aligned himself with factional struggles, including support for Constantino Chiwenga, and could not be detached from succession battles within ZANU PF.

Yet in his final interventions, he also signalled a withdrawal from personal ambition. “I am old and have played my part.” This was not a renunciation of politics, but a recognition of political finitude.

It gestured toward an implicit critique of gerontocratic entitlement, even as it remained entangled in factional realities. What emerged was not moral ascent, but an exit from centre stage. Not an exit from history.

Finally, Geza insisted that the struggle does not end with the liberation generation. This resonates less with abstract state theory than with a widely shared political ethic across liberation movements, the idea that no generation owns the nation.

A nation belongs to all who live in it and to those yet to be born. Leadership, in this view, is custodial rather than proprietary. Liberation is not possession.

It is inheritance, held in trust and exercised with responsibility. It is this insistence that the struggle must outlive its veterans and answer to a future it will never fully see that gives his final political message its enduring force.

Dr Phillan Zamchiya is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He writes here in his personal capacity.