There is something deeply Zimbabwean about announcing a protest with the confidence of a revolutionary and then waking up on the morning of the revolution, looking outside, seeing three police trucks, remembering that you have rent to pay, and deciding that perhaps political transformation can wait until Tuesday.
This is not entirely a joke.
The much-discussed protests called in opposition to Zimbabwe’s constitutional changes failed to materialise in anything resembling the mass mobilisation that had been anticipated. The streets did not fill. There was no great national uprising. Business largely carried on. For many Zimbabweans, the great day of resistance became something closer to an unusually tense stay-at-home day.
And it is tempting to conclude that Zimbabweans simply do not care anymore.
I don’t think that is quite right.
In fact, I think something much more interesting is happening.
Zimbabwe is experiencing what might be called political fatigue, and understanding that fatigue is probably more important than simply asking why people did not protest. Because sometimes people stop protesting not because they are happy. They stop because they have learned that being unhappy is not, by itself, enough to change anything.
And that is a much more frightening political problem.
First, what were people actually protesting?
The immediate issue was the constitutional amendment extending the terms of office of the President, Parliament and local authorities. The changes effectively pushed the next presidential election from the previously expected 2028 contest to 2030.
There were also concerns about electoral reforms and voter registration, but these did not appear to generate the same public energy. The central grievance was therefore relatively straightforward: people were being asked to accept a political timetable that had changed beneath their feet, without the broader public referendum that Zimbabweans are supposed to associate with major constitutional changes.
The legal argument around how the amendment was passed is complicated, because the ruling party had the parliamentary numbers required to push it through.
But politics is not merely a question of whether something is technically legal.
Constitutions are political documents. Their legitimacy depends not only on whether the correct number of MPs raised their hands at the correct moment, but also on whether citizens believe the rules of the political game are being respected.
That distinction matters.
A government can win the parliamentary arithmetic and still lose something much more important: public confidence. So opposition groups and civil society called people into the streets.
And then…
Nothing much happened.
Which raises the obvious question.
Why?
The first problem: You cannot mobilise people who don’t know who is leading them
One of the most basic theories of collective action is also one of the least glamorous.
People need coordination.
Political scientist Mancur Olson famously argued that collective action presents a basic problem: individuals may benefit from a collective outcome without wanting to personally bear the cost of achieving it.
Everyone wants better roads. Everyone wants cheaper food. Everyone wants competent hospitals. Everyone would probably enjoy a government that behaves itself. But who is going to miss work on Thursday to stand in the sun with a placard?
This is the classic collective-action problem.
The Zimbabwe protests suffered from precisely this problem.
There were political figures, pressure groups and civil society organisations calling for action, but there was no sufficiently convincing, visible and unified leadership capable of transforming political frustration into collective action.
As one of the analysts discussing the protests pointed out, organisers did not appear to lead from the front. There were calls for people to protest, but many of those making the calls were not visibly putting themselves in the same danger they were asking ordinary citizens to accept.
And that matters enormously.
Leadership in a protest movement is not simply about issuing a statement. It is about demonstrating that you are willing to pay the same price you are asking everybody else to pay. Martin Luther King Jr. did not spend the civil rights movement tweeting inspirational quotes from a safe office. Lech Wałęsa did not tell Polish workers to overthrow communist rule while remaining comfortably unavailable at the shipyard.
Nelson Mandela and the leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle certainly understood that political resistance involved personal risk. People follow people who demonstrate commitment. If the person calling for a revolution appears to be waiting for everyone else to start it, the revolution tends to develop the energy of a WhatsApp group nobody wants to respond to.
The second problem: Zimbabweans have jobs to lose
This is where political theory meets the Zimbabwean economy. Zimbabwe has an enormous informal sector.
That means a traditional protest strategy such as a stay-away has a different economic meaning here than it might in a highly formalised economy. If you are employed by a large company and there is a national strike, you may lose a day’s wages. If you are selling tomatoes, fixing phones, driving a kombi, mining, trading or running a small informal business, missing a day can mean something much more immediate.
You do not simply lose a day.
You lose today’s income.
The analysts in the discussion highlighted exactly this problem. For many people operating in the informal economy, participating in a protest means closing the business, abandoning the day’s trade or foregoing whatever income would have been generated. This is why economic insecurity can paradoxically make political mobilisation harder. The poorer you are, the more urgently you may need political change.
But the poorer you are, the more expensive political participation can become.
That is a horrible little paradox.
The person who most needs the system to change may be the person least able to afford spending Tuesday afternoon changing it.
Then there is repression
And here we have to stop pretending that fear is an irrational response.
Zimbabweans have every reason to understand what state power can look like.
The Constitution provides for peaceful demonstrations. Yet protest organisers still have to navigate police notification requirements, security restrictions and warnings from authorities. Before the planned demonstrations, police presence was increased and authorities publicly warned people against taking to the streets. That changes the psychological calculation.
Imagine someone tells you:
“Come and protest tomorrow.”
You ask:
“What happens?”
They say:
“Maybe nothing.”
You ask:
“And if something does happen?”
Silence.
Suddenly the cost-benefit analysis becomes less philosophical.
Political scientist Charles Tilly’s work on contentious politics is useful here. Movements do not operate in a vacuum. Their success depends partly on what Tilly described through the broader concept of political opportunity: the openness or closure of the political environment in which collective action occurs.
A protest movement needs some space in which to organise, communicate, recruit and demonstrate. Close that space and mobilisation becomes dramatically harder. This is why repression does not have to arrest everybody. It merely has to convince enough people that somebody else might be arrested.
Fear is contagious.
So is caution.
Political fatigue is not the same thing as apathy
This, for me, is the most important part. We often describe politically exhausted populations as apathetic. That word is convenient because it makes the problem sound like a failure of citizens.
But political fatigue is different.
Apathy says:
“I don’t care.”
Fatigue says:
“I care, but I don’t believe anything I do will change the outcome.”
Those are completely different political conditions.
The discussion around Zimbabwe’s protests identifies precisely this phenomenon. Analysts described a broader national fatigue with both the ruling party’s seemingly entrenched position and the weakness of the opposition, alongside a growing prioritisation of economic survival.
That is not political apathy.
It is political exhaustion.
And exhaustion can be more difficult to overcome.
A person who does not care can potentially be persuaded. A person who cares deeply but has concluded that participation is pointless is much harder to mobilise.
They have already tried emotionally. They have already voted. They have already argued. They have already watched elections. They have already watched politicians promise change. They have already seen movements rise spectacularly on Twitter and collapse spectacularly in real life.
Eventually the brain develops an emergency survival mechanism.
Stop expecting things.
Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty
This brings us to another useful political idea. In 1970, economist Albert Hirschman published Exit, Voice and Loyalty, in which he examined how people respond when institutions deteriorate. Broadly speaking, they have three options.
They can stay and complain.
That’s voice.
They can leave.
That’s exit.
Or they can remain loyal and hope things improve.
Zimbabwe has become a fascinating laboratory for this theory. Millions of Zimbabweans have effectively chosen exit. They have moved to South Africa, Britain, Australia, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Others remain but have psychologically withdrawn from politics. And others continue participating, voting, complaining and organising.
But the growth of exit changes the political equation.
If the politically energetic young person is increasingly thinking about getting a passport rather than joining a political party, the opposition has a demographic problem.
Another political analyst I spoke to made precisely this point, noting that many younger Zimbabweans are increasingly focused on survival, entertainment and leaving the country, with politics becoming less ideological and more material.
That is devastating for a political movement. You cannot build a revolution out of people who are busy checking flights to Johannesburg.
The opposition has a credibility problem too
And here is the uncomfortable bit. The government cannot be blamed for everything.
Zimbabwe’s opposition has its own crisis.
For years, opposition politics has been heavily personalised.
Leaders have split.
Parties have fractured.
Movements have appeared and disappeared.
Coalitions have been announced with the enthusiasm of a wedding and dissolved with the bitterness of a divorce. The result is that many Zimbabweans no longer see opposition politics as a credible vehicle for changing their lives. This is particularly damaging because successful protest movements usually require more than anger.
They require organisation. They require infrastructure. They require trusted networks. They require leadership. They require a strategy for what happens after people march home. And they require some belief that victory is possible.
The Zimbabwean protests appear to have struggled with precisely this.
There was a grievance.
There was anger.
But there was not enough organisational machinery to transform that anger into sustained collective action.
The Arab Spring is the warning label
This is where history becomes useful. In 2011, huge protests helped bring down governments in Tunisia and Egypt. For a moment, it looked like the Arab world had discovered a new political technology.
People filled streets.
Dictators fell.
Social media became the hero of every TED Talk.
Then history, being history, became considerably less cooperative.
Egypt returned to authoritarian rule.
Libya descended into civil war.
Syria became one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the modern era.
The lesson is not that protests do not work. The lesson is that removing a government and building a new political order are two completely different tasks. A protest can be extraordinarily successful at saying “No.” It is much harder to organise the “What next?”
That distinction is critical.
The Civil Rights Movement understood something Zimbabwean movements sometimes forget
The American civil rights movement did not succeed because millions of people suddenly woke up one morning and became morally enlightened. It succeeded through years of organisation. Churches became organising centres. Local communities developed networks. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted more than a year. Students organised sit-ins. Freedom Riders travelled across segregated states.
The movement developed leadership structures, legal strategies, fundraising networks, media strategies and, critically, a sustained ability to keep going. The famous marches were the visible part. The organisation underneath them was the machine. This is why simply announcing a protest is not a movement.
A movement is what happens when people continue organising after the cameras disappear.
And then there is Gene Sharp
Gene Sharp, whose work on nonviolent resistance became enormously influential, identified hundreds of methods of nonviolent action. The important point was that resistance is not synonymous with marching.
Boycotts, strikes, consumer resistance, work stoppages, non-cooperation, alternative institutions, symbolic protests and civil disobedience. All of these can become forms of political pressure. This matters because governments are often much better at dealing with one big protest than with thousands of small acts of organised non-cooperation.
A government can barricade a street.
It is harder to barricade an entire society.
But that requires organisation.
And organisation requires time.
Which brings us back to Zimbabwe.
The biggest problem may be that people are simply tired
There is something almost cruel about asking people who are struggling economically to also become full-time defenders of democracy.
A mother worrying about school fees has limited emotional capacity for constitutional theory.
A man trying to find fuel has limited time for political strategy.
A young person trying to leave the country may understandably regard another political rally as an interesting use of approximately zero minutes of their remaining optimism.
The analysts discussing Zimbabwe noted that economic survival has become a major priority, with many people operating in an informal economy and relying on day-to-day income.
And this is where political and economic crises become intertwined.
People don’t simply ask:
“Is the government democratic?”
They ask:
“Can I feed my family?”
“Can I get a job?”
“Can I afford school fees?”
“Will the hospital have medicine?”
“Can I start a business without knowing someone?”
Political legitimacy eventually becomes material.
You can tell people that constitutional democracy matters.
They will agree.
But eventually they will ask you what democracy is doing for the person standing in a hospital queue without medicine.
So did the protests actually fail?
Yes.
But not necessarily because Zimbabweans are happy. And not necessarily because the government has won the argument. The protests failed at the level of mass mobilisation. They did not produce the visible public pressure their organisers wanted. They did not create a sufficiently powerful political spectacle.
They did not significantly disrupt government operations. And they did not demonstrate that the opposition currently possesses the organisational capacity to mobilise the country at scale. But there is another kind of failure worth discussing.
The failure of political imagination. If citizens increasingly believe that nothing they do matters, that may be a greater long-term danger than one failed protest. Because authoritarian politics does not always require everybody to love the government.
Sometimes it merely requires enough people to believe that resistance is pointless. That is much cheaper.
The dangerous success of making people tired
There is a famous idea in political science that authoritarian stability is not maintained solely through brute force. It is also maintained through uncertainty, patronage, selective repression, institutional weakness and the fragmentation of opposition.
Zimbabwe’s political system illustrates many of these dynamics. The discussion around the protests notes the importance of patronage networks, with businesses and individuals benefiting from proximity to the state and ruling party.
That creates another obstacle.
If political participation might cost you your business, your tender, your livelihood or your relationship with the state, suddenly politics becomes personal economics. You don’t need to convince everybody that the government is good. You merely need to convince enough people that opposing it is expensive.
That is how political fatigue becomes institutionalised.
But history is also full of surprises
This is the part where I refuse to become completely miserable. Political systems that appear immovable often aren’t. The Soviet Union looked permanent. Apartheid looked permanent.
The Berlin Wall looked permanent.
The military dictatorships of Latin America looked permanent.
Then, suddenly, they weren’t.
The East German regime did not fall because everybody simultaneously became brave. It fell after years of accumulated economic, political and social pressure, eventually reaching a point where the cost of maintaining the old order became greater than the cost of changing it.
The same was true in apartheid South Africa. The final victory was not produced by one march.
It was the accumulated result of decades of protest, strikes, international pressure, underground organising, trade unions, student movements, cultural resistance, armed struggle, diplomacy and economic pressure.
History rarely changes because of one dramatic Tuesday. It changes because thousands of Tuesdays eventually become unbearable.
So what does Zimbabwe actually need?
Probably not another protest announcement.
At least not yet.
Zimbabwe needs something much less exciting and much more difficult.
Organisation.
It needs political movements that can survive individual personalities. It needs opposition parties that can articulate an actual political programme rather than simply saying “not ZANU-PF.” It needs civil society organisations capable of sustained community organising. It needs young people who understand that democracy is not simply something that happens every five years at a polling station. It needs economic policies that give people enough breathing room to participate politically.
And it needs institutions that people can trust.
Media analysts discussing the country’s political situation on a popular new channel also pointed toward many of these institutional requirements: freedom to assemble, freedom of political expression, independent security services and an independent judiciary.
Most importantly, Zimbabwe needs to rebuild the belief that politics can actually produce change.
Because that belief is the fuel of democracy.
Maybe the protesters didn’t fail. Maybe the movement hasn’t been built yet.
This is perhaps the conclusion I find most interesting. We have become obsessed with the spectacle of protest. The photographs, the crowds, the placards, the police lines, the dramatic speeches, the hashtag.
But protest is only one tool in political organising and a failed protest does not necessarily mean a failed movement. Sometimes it tells you what the movement is missing.
Zimbabwe’s latest experience tells us quite a lot.
The country has grievances.
It has frustrated citizens.
It has an exhausted population.
It has young people increasingly disengaging from formal politics.
It has a large informal economy that makes traditional strikes difficult.
It has a political opposition struggling with credibility and organisation, and it has a state with considerably more capacity to intimidate, organise and deploy resources than most opposition groups.
That is not a recipe for spontaneous revolution.
It is a recipe for political fatigue.
And perhaps that is the real story.
The most dangerous sentence in politics is not:
“I disagree with the government.”
It is:
“What’s the point?”
Because once a population reaches that point, the government does not necessarily have to win the argument.
It only has to wait.
And that is why the failure of one protest should not make Zimbabweans give up.
It should make them ask a much harder question:
What would it take to make people believe that changing the country is actually possible again?
Because once people believe that change is possible, history has a rather inconvenient habit of becoming very unpredictable.
