The Moment

An Old Question, Asked Again

Zimbabwe is in the middle of a serious national conversation about how it should be governed. The Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 3) Bill proposes far-reaching changes — among them longer terms of office and a different method of selecting the President. The details are contested, and we will come to them honestly. But beneath the specifics sits a far older and more interesting question, one that Pan-African scholars have wrestled with since independence: did the system Africa adopted at independence ever truly fit the societies it was laid over?

TeteGetty approaches this in a spirit of calm curiosity, not alarm. We have lived through enough cycles to know that the most important questions deserve cool heads, not hot ones. And this is the right moment to ask, because the world itself is shifting. Confidence in the Western liberal-democratic model is visibly strained in the very societies that exported it — polarisation, gridlock, the corrosive role of money in politics, and falling public trust are now documented features of mature Western democracies, not African caricatures of them. When the inventors of a system are openly struggling with it, it is only wise for the rest of us to ask whether we should keep importing it unaltered, or whether our own heritage offers something worth recovering.

Plain Language First · Tichakurukura Pachikuru
When the British left in 1980, they handed Zimbabwe a ready-made way of choosing leaders: every few years, everyone votes, the side with the most votes wins, the losing side becomes the “opposition.” It sounds fair. But ask yourself — is this how our families, our villages, our chiefs actually made decisions for the thousand years before the British came? No. We sat at the dare. We talked, sometimes for days, until we reached something everyone could live with. There were no “losers” to nurse a grudge until the next election. This journal asks a simple, respectful question: which way actually suits us better — and what would it mean to trust our own tradition again?
Our Own Inheritance

How the Zimbabwe Plateau Actually Governed

Long before 1980, and long before 1884, the peoples of the Zimbabwe Plateau ran sophisticated systems of governance — at Mapungubwe, at Great Zimbabwe, at Khami, under the Rozvi and the Mutapa state. These were not chaotic or “primitive” arrangements. They were layered, deliberative, and remarkably stable, binding together vast territories and trade networks that reached the Swahili coast and beyond.

At the heart of it was governance by consensus, expressed through the institution of the dare — the council in which the chief (ishe/mambo) governed not by command but by drawing agreement out of his council of elders, headmen (sadunhu) and village heads (sabhuku), who in turn carried the voice of their people. Authority flowed both ways. A chief who ignored his people lost legitimacy; a decision that lacked consensus was simply not taken until it could be reached. This is the system that still governs the daily life of the 75% of Zimbabweans who live in rural areas under chieftaincy today — a living tradition, not a museum piece.

When 75% of a nation lives within this system every day, and finds a proposed return to consensus-style, less-adversarial governance familiar and comfortable, that is not ignorance — as some in the cities suggest. It is recognition. They are seeing, in modern constitutional language, the shape of something their communities never stopped practising.

The Scholarship

This Is Not a Fringe Idea — The Pan-African Thinkers

The argument that Africa should govern from its own traditions rather than imported templates is not a convenient political slogan. It is one of the most serious bodies of thought in modern African and comparative political philosophy. Here are the thinkers who built it.

Prof. Kwasi Wiredu (Ghana)
“Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics: A Plea for a Non-Party Polity” (2000)
The towering reference. Wiredu argues that pre-colonial African societies governed by consensus, and that a non-party consensual democracy — rooted in African humanist and communitarian values — could avoid the failures of both the one-party state and the adversarial Western multi-party system. He draws directly on traditional councils as a usable model for today.
Prof. Claude Ake (Nigeria)
“The Feasibility of Democracy in Africa” (2000)
Ake argued that what was exported to Africa was a thin, liberal, procedural democracy stripped of real popular power — and that genuine African democracy must be communal, grounded in concrete economic and social rights, not just periodic voting between elites.
Prof. Mahmood Mamdani (Uganda)
“Citizen and Subject” (1996)
Mamdani showed how colonialism split Africans into urban “citizens” governed by civil law and rural “subjects” governed through chiefs — a divide that still echoes in today’s city-versus-rural tension over governance. Understanding it is essential to understanding why the cities and the villages see this debate so differently.
Mwalimu Julius Nyerere & Kwame Nkrumah
Ujamaa; consciencism & the communal tradition
The independence generation already insisted that African governance should grow from African communal values — that the extended family and the village council, not the adversarial party, were the natural units of African political life.
A non-party system based on consensus could avoid the evident problems of both the one-party system and the multi-party system imposed by the West.
Paraphrasing Prof. Kwasi Wiredu · Consensual Democracy
The Case

What Consensus-Style Governance Could Offer Zimbabweans — Tap Each

If Zimbabwe leaned more toward its own consensual traditions, what would ordinary people actually gain? Here is the honest case for it — the advantages its supporters point to.

🕊️
An End to Cyclical Election Violence
Breaking the bloody five-year cycle that fractures communities.
Tap for the case

Across Africa, the winner-takes-all election cycle has repeatedly produced violence, displacement and trauma — neighbours turned against neighbours every few years. Consensus governance, which produces no humiliated “loser” camp, removes the central trigger. For a people who prize peace, this is the headline benefit.

SavesLives, social trust, and communities that have lived side by side for generations
TraditionThe dare produced agreement, not a defeated faction nursing a grudge
💰
Enormous Cost Savings
Elections are extraordinarily expensive for a developing economy.
Tap for the case

Running national elections — the commission, the materials, the security, the repeat run-offs, the disputes — costs developing nations enormous sums every cycle, money that could build clinics, boreholes and schools. Longer terms and less frequent, less adversarial contests redirect scarce resources toward development.

SavesTens of millions per cycle that a developing economy can ill afford
RedirectsFunds toward infrastructure, health and education instead of campaigns
🤝
Protecting Community & Kinship
No more families and villages split along party lines.
Tap for the case

Adversarial party politics imports division into the most intimate spaces — families arguing across party lines, villages split, lifelong friendships strained every campaign season. Consensual, community-rooted governance protects the social fabric of Ubuntu: relationships that took generations to build are not sacrificed to a five-year contest.

ProtectsThe Ubuntu social fabric — “I am because we are”
RestoresDecision-making that binds communities rather than dividing them
🌍
Cultural Authenticity & Stability
Governance that 75% already understand and trust.
Tap for the case

A system that mirrors the consensual, elder-led, community-rooted governance of the rural majority is one they instinctively understand, trust and can participate in — rather than a foreign template that often baffles and excludes them. Legitimacy that flows from cultural familiarity tends to be more stable than legitimacy imposed from outside.

AlignsNational governance with the living tradition of the 75% rural majority
StabilityContinuity and long-horizon planning rather than five-year lurches
📈
Long-Horizon Development
Planning beyond the next election cycle.
Tap for the case

Short electoral cycles push leaders toward quick wins and populist spending rather than the patient, decade-long projects — beneficiation plants, gas infrastructure, irrigation — that actually transform economies. Longer, more stable tenures can, in principle, enable the kind of multi-decade planning that built the Asian development success stories.

EnablesMulti-decade industrial & infrastructure strategy (see TGRI Econ Journals 22–24)
CautionOnly delivers if leadership stays accountable — see the honest questions below
🗳️
Self-Determination
Africa’s sovereign right to design its own institutions.
Tap for the case

The deepest argument is simply sovereignty. Africa has every right to examine the models on offer — Western liberal, East Asian meritocratic, and its own indigenous traditions — and to design something that fits its peoples, rather than accept that one 18th-century European model is the only legitimate destination for all humanity.

PrincipleA continent free to choose, blend and innovate its own governance
SpiritDecolonising not just borders and economies, but political imagination
Two Ways to Decide

Adversarial Contest vs Consensus

At the simplest level, the two models differ in what they do to a society after the decision is made.

The Borrowed Model
Winner Takes All
One side wins, the other loses and waits, resentful, for the next contest. Every few years the society re-fights the same battle. Communities split along party lines. The losing half feels unheard until it can win — and sometimes the losing is not accepted at all, and the violence begins.
The Plateau Tradition
Everyone Lives With It
The council reasons together until it reaches a position the whole community can accept. There is no humiliated loser, no faction plotting revenge. The decision binds because everyone shaped it. The community stays whole. This is how the dare worked — and how much of rural Zimbabwe still works today.
Why the Rural Conversation Felt Familiar
Zimbabwe’s population: where the living tradition lives
The Comparative Lens

Not the Only Country Asking: The Meritocracy Debate

Zimbabwe is far from alone in questioning whether “one person, one vote every few years” is the only or best way to choose leaders. The most influential comparative work here is by the Canadian-born scholar Daniel A. Bell, longtime professor in China, whose book The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton, 2015) opens with a direct critique of one-person-one-vote as a way of choosing top leaders, and argues that political meritocracy — selecting leaders for proven ability and virtue — can remedy real flaws in electoral democracy.

Bell describes the Chinese system as “democracy at the bottom, experimentation in the middle, meritocracy at the top” — local participation feeding into a leadership selected and promoted on competence over decades. Whatever one makes of it, the results are hard to wave away: China lifted more people out of poverty, faster, than any society in human history. For African nations weighing how to escape poverty, the question naturally arises — is the Western model the only road, or merely one road?

An Honest Balance
TeteGetty does not argue that Zimbabwe should copy China, or anyone. Bell himself is careful about meritocracy’s pitfalls — corruption and the hardship of removing bad leaders among them. The point is simpler and more liberating: the world’s political menu is not a choice between “Western democracy” and “failure.” There is a real, scholarly, globally-debated spectrum of systems. Africa is entitled to study the whole menu — Western, East Asian, and its own indigenous consensual traditions — and to cook something that nourishes its own people.
The Live Case Study

Zimbabwe’s Amendment (No. 3) Bill: The Test in Front of Us

So how does Zimbabwe’s actual proposed reform sit within this big, respectable debate? Honestly — and a tradition that prizes the dare must be honest — the Bill is best understood as a real-world test of these ideas, and a mature nation should weigh it with open eyes rather than swallow or reject it whole.

The Bill proposes, among other things, to extend the terms of the President, Parliament and local authorities from five to seven years; to elect the President through a joint sitting of Parliament rather than a direct national vote; and to adjust several appointment powers. Parliament’s public-consultation tally reported a large majority in favour. Supporters present it through exactly the lens of this journal: as a move toward stability, cost-saving, and a less adversarial, more consensual style that the rural majority finds familiar.

The Questions a Healthy Dare Would Ask
Here is where the deliberative tradition shows its true wisdom: the dare did not fear hard questions — it worked precisely by airing them until trust was reached. So the honest questions deserve airing too. Does electing a president through Parliament rather than directly strengthen consensus, or does it risk weakening the people’s direct voice that the dare always protected? Zimbabwe’s own Constitution, in Section 328, currently guards against a sitting leader benefiting from a term extension without a referendum — how should that safeguard be honoured? And were the consultations genuinely deep enough, given the compressed hearing windows that some observers flagged? These are not “Western” questions or “city” questions — they are exactly the questions a council of elders would insist on resolving before it could honestly say consensus had been reached. Asking them is not disloyalty. It is the tradition working as designed.

The most authentic outcome, in the spirit of the Zimbabwe Plateau, would be one that the whole community — rural and urban, supporter and sceptic — can genuinely live with. That is the real test of consensus: not a large number on a tally sheet, but a settlement so widely accepted that no significant part of the nation feels it was decided over their heads. A reform that achieves that becomes durable and peaceful; one that does not, invites the very instability everyone wishes to avoid. The prize worth keeping our eyes on is not victory for one side — it is a settlement the whole family of the nation can carry together.

The Wider Tide

A World That Is Already Shifting

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Across the Global South, confidence in the post-1945 Western order is at a low ebb, and African nations are increasingly willing to choose partners and models on their own terms. The same continent that just elected Zimbabwe to the UN Security Council (TGRI Africa Journal, this week) is asserting, everywhere, its right to define its own path. Offers of fairer, less conditional partnership — including zero-tariff access to large markets — naturally grow more attractive when the older partnerships came wrapped in lectures and double standards.

Tete Getty’s Take

Keep the Peace, Keep the Questions, Keep the Sovereignty

Those who know me from my university days know my long-held view: that Western liberal democracy, beautiful on paper, was laid over African societies whose own traditions had governed by consensus, peace and community for centuries — until the borders of 1884 cut through them. I have never believed Africa is incapable of democracy. I believe Africa already had its own, older democracy, and was taught to be ashamed of it. Recovering that inheritance is not backwardness. It is homecoming.

So I welcome this conversation warmly. I am glad 75% of Zimbabwe can look at a more consensual, less adversarial model and feel, “I know this — this is how my grandmother’s village decides things.” That recognition is precious, and the cities would do well to listen to it rather than dismiss it. And I hold, just as warmly, to the questions the dare itself would ask — because honouring tradition means honouring the whole tradition, including its insistence that consensus be real, that the people’s voice stay strong, and that trust be earned, not assumed.

Tete wants peace. If a governance model rooted in our own soil can end the cyclical election violence, keep families and villages whole, save scarce resources for clinics and boreholes, and let us plan in decades rather than election seasons — then yes, please, let us explore it with open and confident hearts. And let us do it the way our ancestors did: together, in the open, until the whole nation can say with one voice, this we can live with. That is the African way. That is the way back to ourselves.

Africa is not choosing between democracy and darkness. It is remembering that it governed itself — wisely, peacefully, by consensus — long before anyone arrived to grade it. The task of our generation is not to copy East or West, but to recover what was ours, keep what serves the people, and build a system the whole nation can carry together. Peace is the prize. Sovereignty is the path. The dare is the inheritance.
Tete Getty · TGRI · Africa, SADC & Second Great Zimbabwe Journals · 4 June 2026