No more false dawns for Zimbabwe

TimesLIVE

09-05-2025

The failed national shutdown in Zimbabwe was not only a tactical defeat, it was a brutal reminder of the limits of top-down, leader-centric politics.
For all the courage and commitment shown by figures such as Blessed 'Bombshell' Geza, the reality is undeniable: without deep-rooted, decentralised, mass-based movements, no real change is possible.
The people stayed away, not from work, but from the shutdown itself. The reasons are structural, not merely psychological. They point to the urgent need for a new politics, one that abandons charismatic saviours and elite bargaining in favour of collective, bottom-up power.
The collapse of Geza's shutdown call reveals a sobering truth about Zimbabwean politics: citizens are not apathetic by nature. They are trapped in a political economy of survival, where the costs of protest are immediate and brutal while the rewards are uncertain and distant.
Even worse, decades of state violence, economic devastation and opposition fragmentation have atomised Zimbabwe's working class, severing the organic bonds of solidarity that once made collective action possible. In this context, appeals from above, no matter how sincere, are destined to fall flat.
Geza's attempt to mobilise a national shutdown followed a pattern that has long doomed Zimbabwean resistance: a charismatic figure calls for mass action, but without the underlying architecture of popular self-organisation needed to sustain it. Movements rooted in the authority of a singular leader are inherently fragile. They rise and fall with the individual, not with the strength of collective structures.
In anarchist analysis, effective resistance does not begin with declarations from above. It is painstakingly built from below, through local assemblies, workplace committees, mutual aid networks and popular education.
Without the structures, the call for a shutdown became an abstract appeal, a hope rather than a plan. No neighbourhood councils were coordinating food supplies for strikers. No underground unions were preparing workers for retaliation. No community defence groups stood ready to protect participants from the regime's inevitable violence. Geza's call was brave, but bravery alone does not substitute for organisation.
In a society where 95% unemployment forces people into precarious work, and where missing a day of income can mean hunger, simply telling citizens to 'stay home' without providing material support was a non-starter. Shutdowns succeed not because people are asked to suffer for an idea, but because they are supported through collective infrastructure that cushions the blows of repression and privation.
The state, for its part, has perfected the arts of counterinsurgency. Surveillance, infiltration, selective arrests and brutal crackdowns have shredded trust within communities. Fear is not an irrational response, it is a learnt survival strategy. Breaking through it does not require heroic calls from the rooftops, but the slow, patient work of rebuilding horizontal bonds of trust and solidarity at the grassroots.
Zimbabwe once boasted a formidable labour movement, spearheaded by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions), which gave birth to the original Movement for Democratic Change in the late 1990s. But systematic repression, co-optation and economic collapse have gutted organised labour.
In today's Zimbabwe, the working class exists largely in the informal economy, scattered across precarious livelihoods, with little or no collective bargaining power.
Without organised workplaces, a general strike — the backbone of any serious shutdown — is impossible. Informal workers cannot simply 'down tools' when their survival depends on daily hustling
Without organised workplaces, a general strike — the backbone of any serious shutdown — is impossible. Informal workers cannot simply 'down tools' when their survival depends on daily hustling. Striking means starvation, and in the absence of mutual aid structures to mitigate the risks, survival will always trump protest.
There is a persistent romanticism about 'spontaneous uprisings', the idea that a sudden spark will ignite mass resistance. But anarchist history teaches otherwise. Even the most seemingly 'spontaneous' revolts, from the Spanish Revolution of 1936 to the 2019 Hong Kong protests, were preceded by years, sometimes decades, of underground organising, cultural work and institution-building. Spontaneity is not the absence of preparation, it is its eruption.
In Zimbabwe, there were no neighbourhood assemblies debating tactics, no rank-and-file workers' councils plotting coordination, no clandestine affinity groups planning resistance. The shutdown was, at its heart, a media event more than a social movement, a call disseminated through WhatsApp groups and social media but lacking the flesh and blood institutions that alone can sustain real confrontation with state power.
Geza's emergence as a 'leader' from within the ruling party's dissident faction speaks volumes. In the absence of a credible opposition rooted in working class organising, the only alternative to President Emmerson Mnangagwa's dictatorship appeared to be another elite figure from the same liberation-era military caste. A change of faces, not of structures.
For many citizens, the choice between Mnangagwa and Geza must have seemed depressingly familiar: two wings of the same predatory class battling for control over a ruined state. Without a politics that offers a different kind of power — horizontal, participatory, rooted in real material transformation — there is no compelling reason for ordinary people to risk their lives.
The immediate consequence of the shutdown's failure is grim. Mnangagwa has been handed a propaganda victory. His regime will portray the lack of mass participation as evidence of popular support, emboldening further repression and deepening the rot of corruption and decay.
• Maisiri is a researcher and educator focused on labour, social movements and emancipatory politics in Southern Africa.