The Africa Journal · SADC Journal · Sovereignty & Solidarity
What Is Done to Zimbabwe Is Done to Africa: The Continent Demands an Unconditional End to the Sanctions
On 23 October the African Union renewed its demand for the immediate, unconditional lifting of the unilateral sanctions on Zimbabwe — and today the region marks SADC Anti-Sanctions Day. This is not sympathy for one country. It is self-defence by a continent that understands a weapon used on one member can be turned on any of them.
This week the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, HE Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, spoke on behalf of fifty-five African states: the unilateral sanctions on Zimbabwe must be lifted — immediately, and without conditions. He said it two days before 25 October, the Day of Solidarity with Zimbabwe that SADC has marked every year since 2019, and he aligned the whole continent with the region’s stance. When the African Union and SADC speak one sentence together, listen closely — because they are not only defending Zimbabwe. They are defending a principle that protects every African state.
This Journal wrote to Britain’s Prime Minister about this only days ago (see “Dear Prime Minister Burnham”). Now the matter sits at its proper height — not one capital at a time, but the continent as a bloc. The AU Chairperson put it without hedging:
The African Union “once again renews the long-standing demand… for the immediate and unconditional lifting of unilateral sanctions imposed against institutions and individuals of the Republic of Zimbabwe.”— AU Commission Chairperson HE Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, 23 October 2026
Read the two load-bearing words. Unilateral. And unconditional. Between them, they dismantle the story the world was told about Zimbabwe — and they explain why this is a continental matter, not a bilateral one.
Read the two words
“Unilateral” and “unconditional” are the whole argument
Unilateral
imposed by a few, not decided by the world
These measures were imposed by individual powers acting alone — the United States, the European Union, Britain — not by the United Nations Security Council. “Unilateral” quietly corrects the record: this was never the verdict of “the international community.” It was the decision of a handful of Western capitals. The 55 states of the African Union have never recognised it, and most of the world never joined it.
Unconditional
not a reward to be earned
Africa is refusing the familiar bargain — do this, reform that, and we may lift them. The AU is not asking for softer conditions. It is saying the measures are illegitimate and should simply end. You do not negotiate the price of something that should never have been charged. That is a posture of dignity, not supplication.
Why the whole continent answers
What is done to Zimbabwe is done to Africa
Here is the deeper logic the AU is speaking to, even when it is too diplomatic to say it outright. A unilateral sanction that sticks to one African state is a demonstration. It tells every other capital on the continent: this can be done to you. Fall out of favour with a Western government, nationalise the wrong asset, choose the wrong partner, win the wrong election — and your access to the world’s banks, your investment, your credit can be switched off, lawfully or not, for a generation. Zimbabwe is the warning the whole continent was meant to read.
So when fifty-five African states and sixteen SADC members stand together, they are not being sentimental. They are doing what any community does when one of its members is made an example of: they refuse to let the example stand. SADC Anti-Sanctions Day is not a day of pity. It is a day of collective self-defence. The AU’s position, stripped to its core, says: whatever you impose on Zimbabwe, you impose on the idea of African sovereignty itself.
And here the contradiction becomes impossible to miss: a power cannot claim to “support Africa through trade and development” while holding an illegal economic weapon to the throat of an African member. The two postures cancel each other. Partnership and punishment cannot be the same hand.
The fact the word “sanctions” hides
Zimbabwe has never been under United Nations sanctions
Say “sanctions” and most people picture the United Nations — the whole world, through the Security Council, passing judgement. For Zimbabwe, that picture is simply false. There are, and have been, zero UN Security Council sanctions on Zimbabwe. Every measure is the act of a particular state or bloc, renewed year by year by that same body.
MULTILATERAL — THE UNITED NATIONS
- No UN Security Council sanctions on Zimbabwe — none, ever
- Not the verdict of the world’s 193 states
UNILATERAL — A FEW CAPITALS
- United States — ZIDERA (2001) plus targeted measures
- European Union — an arms embargo, renewed again to Feb 2026
- United Kingdom — its own post-Brexit regime
This is not only Africa’s complaint. In 2021 the United Nations’ own Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, Professor Alena Douhan, visited Zimbabwe and called for the sanctions to be lifted, finding that they had deepened the country’s economic and humanitarian hardship. An independent UN human-rights expert — not an African government, not a Western one — reached the same conclusion the AU reaches now. So when the AU calls the measures illegal, it stands on solid ground: they carry no UN authority, and the UN’s own expert asked for them to go.
The honest ledger of damage
What the AU says the measures have actually cost
The Chairperson named the harm in the very language of development the imposing powers claim to champion. The AU records that the unilateral sanctions have:
Impacts named in the AU statement, 23 October 2026
- Constrained Zimbabwe’s access to the international financial system — the correspondent-banking and payment rails most trade runs on.
- Deterred foreign direct investment — capital reads a sanctions listing as a reason to stay away.
- Increased the cost of doing business — compliance, de-risking and work-arounds that every Zimbabwean ultimately pays for.
- Severely limited the country’s ability to secure development assistance.
- Undermined progress toward Vision 2030, SADC’s regional convergence targets, the AU’s Agenda 2063, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals — the very frameworks the West helped write.
Let the ledger be honest in both directions. Some measures have genuinely eased — the EU delisted Zimbabwe Defence Industries in February 2025, and Britain has removed most individual listings. These are real and worth recording. But the architecture remains — the arms embargoes, ZIDERA on the United States’ books since 2001 — and it is the architecture, not a single name on a list, that casts the shadow over every banking relationship. That is exactly why the AU says unconditional, and why it says it again now.
The human arithmetic
A generation sentenced for a quarrel it never had
Strip the diplomacy away and ask the plain question. Since when is a whole generation of Zimbabweans made to carry severe economic restraint because of a falling-out between two governments at the turn of the century? The dispute that birthed these measures belonged to the leaders of that moment — their politics, their pride, their quarrel. The punishment fell, and still falls, on people who were not yet born when it began.
A child born in Harare in 2002 is a twenty-four-year-old adult today. They have never known an economy operating with both hands free — never known a Zimbabwe that could bank, borrow and invest like its neighbours. They inherited a disadvantage they did not earn, imposed by powers they never voted for, over a dispute that predates their first breath. That is the textbook definition of collective punishment: harm deliberately maintained against the innocent to pressure the few. We would call it by that name without hesitation if it happened anywhere else.
A question for those who keep it running
Britain found its conscience over one Blair-era policy. Where is it for the other?
Britain knows how to be outraged by a policy made in its name. The Iraq war — launched by a Labour government, judged by much of the public and later by the Chilcot Inquiry to have been a catastrophe of judgement — produced one of the largest protest movements in the country’s history. The British people refused to let an unlawful act be carried out quietly in their name.
Zimbabwe’s sanctions are also a product of that same era and that same government’s posture. Yet two decades on, the economic measures run on, renewed by successive administrations with barely a murmur, while a Labour government sits again in power with the authority to end Britain’s part of them. So this Journal asks, plainly, the questions a generation of British-Zimbabweans — some 200,000 of them — are entitled to put to the party that courts their vote:
This is not an attack on the British people, who have again and again shown solidarity with the wronged. It is a challenge to a policy — and to the comfortable silence that lets an unjust measure outlive the quarrel that created it. Refusal to act is not neutrality. After twenty-four years, it is a choice.
Who is standing with Zimbabwe
This is a continent, not a complaint
Fifty-five states and sixteen, speaking the same sentence, on the same day, year after year. That is not weakness asking for relief. It is a continent serving notice that the age of accepting the weapon is over.
Africa’s own answer
The surest way to end a financial weapon is to build past it
The demand is right and necessary. But Africa is not waiting with its hand out — it is building the instruments that make exclusion from Western financial rails matter less each year. Reduce the chokepoints your opponents control, and the weapon loses its edge.
Built by Afreximbank and the AfCFTA Secretariat, PAPSS lets African businesses pay one another in local currencies, cleared on the continent — routing trade off the dollar-and-SWIFT chokepoint that unilateral measures exploit. Every transaction that clears this way is one a sanctions listing cannot touch.
Where correspondent banks grow timid, African institutions step in. Trade finance, guarantees and project lending sourced on the continent blunt the “de-risking” that sanctions use to starve an economy of credit.
The more Zimbabwe sells into Africa’s own US$1 trillion regional markets, the less a Western listing can isolate it — the same prize Harare is now chairing COMESA to reach (see “The Chair Comes Home”). It doubles as the best sanctions-proofing a country can buy.
None of this excuses the measures or lets the imposing powers off the hook. It does something better: it moves the weapon’s power into African hands, so the demand to lift the sanctions is made from strength, not need.
Tete’s Take
What moves me about this week is not that Africa asked. It is how Africa asked. Not “please reconsider.” Not “we have met your conditions.” But unconditional — the language of a continent that has stopped accepting the premise that its members sit in a dock awaiting a Western verdict. And the AU is defending more than Zimbabwe. It is defending the simple rule that no outside power gets to switch off an African economy at will, because a weapon accepted against one of us is a weapon loaded against all of us.
Hold the human fact at the centre: a twenty-four-year-old in Harare has never known a free-handed economy, punished since before birth for a quarrel that was never theirs, by measures carrying no UN authority and condemned even by the UN’s own expert. Britain found the conscience to disown one Blair-era policy made in its name. The other still runs — and a Labour government holds the pen that could end its part. Silence, after twenty-four years, is not neutrality. It is a decision, and it should be named as one.
So let the continent keep speaking as one on 25 October — and keep laying the PAPSS rails, the African finance, the intra-African markets that make the weapon lighter every year. The sanctions should end because they are unjust. They will end sooner because Africa is making itself impossible to lock out. Ask from principle; build from strength. We are learning, at last, to do both at once.
What is done to one of us is done to all of us. Ask from principle. Build from strength.
Tovera Mudzimu Dzoka
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