By Shelton Muchena| There are moments in a nation’s life when the law is asked not to judge what is, but what some fear might be.

This week, Zimbabwe’s Constitutional Court found itself staring into that void, summoned to rule not on a law, not on a bill, not even on a formal proposal but on a political apparition.

The application landed with urgency and accusation, seeking to block a possible extension of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s term beyond 2028.

Yet as Speaker of Parliament Jacob Mudenda made clear in his opposing affidavit, there was nothing tangible before the court.

No constitutional amendment had been gazetted. No bill had been placed before the Cabinet.

No motion had crossed the floor of Parliament.
The legal machinery required by Section 328 of the Constitution had not even been switched on.

What existed — and this is where critics say the applicants lost the plot — was merely a ZANU-PF party resolution, adopted at the ruling party’s 2024 conference. An internal political position. A conversation among members. A declaration without legal force beyond the walls of the party itself.

To treat that resolution as law, critics argue, is to misunderstand both politics and the Constitution.
Zimbabwe’s Constitution is unambiguous on two crucial points. First, under Section 58, every political party enjoys the right to freedom of association — the freedom to organise, to debate, to adopt positions, and yes, to pass resolutions without external interference. Second, under Section 328, constitutional amendments follow a strict, public, step-by-step process. Until that process begins, the courts have nothing to review.

Yet the applicants ran to court as though ZANU-PF’s internal deliberations were already binding on the nation.

Legal analysts describe the move as reckless — an attempt to provoke a judicial ruling in advance of any constitutional act, thereby collapsing the boundary between party politics and constitutional law. In doing so, they say, the applicants revealed a deeper flaw: they did not understand what they were challenging, nor the stage at which a challenge becomes lawful.

ZANU-PF, like any political party, is entitled to think out loud, to test ideas, to argue with itself. Its resolutions are made by ZANU-PF, for ZANU-PF. They are not legislative instruments. They are not public law. They are not automatically the nation’s business.

To interfere at that level, critics argue, is not constitutional vigilance — it is intrusion.

“This was law chasing speculation,” said one constitutional expert. “The court was asked to rule on a future that has not arrived and a process that has not begun. That is not how constitutionalism works.”

More unsettling, observers say, is the precedent such litigation seeks to create: a country where courts are invited to police political thoughts before they harden into action; where parties are denied the space to reason internally; where fear replaces process.

The Constitution does not authorise that. It restrains it.

In dismissing the challenge as premature, Speaker Mudenda’s affidavit quietly reasserts a principle too often forgotten in moments of political anxiety: the rule of law is not a tool for guessing intentions. It is a framework for judging actions.

Until ZANU-PF places a constitutional amendment before the nation, critics insist, its internal resolutions remain exactly what the Constitution permits them to be private party business. To rush to conclusions, to impose external interpretations, or to demand judicial intervention at this stage is to confess not vigilance, but confusion.

In constitutional democracies, timing is not a technicality. It is everything.

And this case, many now say, was brought against a shadow a case against a ghost.