Let us be candid, without false modesty: somewhere in the quieter corners of power, Chamisa is spoken of with a mix of amusement and appreciation because he reliably relieves pressure off the state. For a ruling party focused on execution, continuity, and long-term planning, his style of politics has become an unexpected advantage – a gift that renews itself every electoral cycle.
While President Mnangagwa’s administration is absorbed in the hard work of dam construction, road rehabilitation, power generation, agricultural recovery, and industrial revival, Chamisa is busy running what can only be described as a longform psychological experiment. He has elevated “strategic ambiguity” into an art form, mistaking the absence of policy for flexibility, and confusion for depth. In practice, it amounts to having no plan at all, delivered with confidence.
The contrast could not be clearer. On one side is a government obsessed with timelines, kilometres, megawatts, and yields. On the other is an opposition that prioritises moods over systems. Chamisa’s politics is built on vibes rather than institutions, prophecy rather than policy. It is politics as aesthetic, not politics as administration.
This has proven extraordinarily convenient. Instead of building durable party structures, he has chosen a cult of personality. Instead of cultivating rural presence and organisational discipline, he has invested heavily in social media noise. Paid digital trolls shout into the void, winning imaginary battles on X while steadily losing the real contest on the ground. The war is fought where votes are counted; he prefers arenas where applause is cheap and accountability is absent.
When momentum fades, another familiar routine emerges. Sympathy is manufactured, persecution is declared, donors are mobilised, and the cycle resets. It is the Madhuku Strategy repackaged for the algorithm age: activism as a subscription service, leadership as episodic fundraising. No institution is built, no governing alternative prepared. Just recycled hope and slogans that serve no real discernable purpose.
Perhaps most remarkably, Chamisa has perfected the art of institutional abandonment. When pressure mounts, party structures are ghosted, MPs are left stranded, and supporters are urged to “trust the process” even as no process exists. Accountability is framed as betrayal; discipline as repression. This absence of internal coherence does more than weaken the opposition – it diffuses it. Energy that might have consolidated into structured resistance instead dissipates into ritualised online venting. Not opposition management, but opposition self-neutralisation.
In this environment, politics has decisively shifted from spectacle to performance. Results now speak louder than rallies. Infrastructure outpaces rhetoric. Policy execution outruns prophecy. In that terrain, Chamisa is permanently outpaced because his model treats politics like a revival meeting rather than a logistical challenge. His followers await a miracle, while ZANUPF delivers tangibles on the ground.
From a ZANUPF perspective, the implications are straightforward. There is no serious policy contest and no credible alternative government-in-waiting. Instead, development proceeds with minimal disruption while the opposition remains locked in cycles of reinvention that change nothing fundamental. In fact, Chamisa does not mobilise the nation against the state; he contains dissent within a closed emotional loop that never matures into governing capacity.
So yes, there is gratitude, born not of malice but of realism. As long as digital noise is mistaken for power, and faith is substituted for strategy, execution will always defeat enthusiasm. Every governing party dreams of an opponent who clears the field without being asked. Zimbabwe happened to get one.
And as long as that remains the case, the future, quite comfortably, belongs to us in ZANUPF.
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