No Church In The Wild: The Selective Conscience of Zimbabwe’s Church Councils, and Why Their Silence in 2017 and 2021 Disqualifies Their Outrage in 2026

Over the past three months, the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD), the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops’ Conference (ZCBC) and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC) have produced an escalating series of statements opposing the Constitution of Zimbabwe (Amendment No. 3) Bill, 2026.

They invoke the liberation struggle, the supremacy of God and the sanctity of the 2013 “covenant.”

They ask Parliament to withdraw the Bill or put it to a referendum. They declare, clause by clause, that they “oppose.”

It would be a formidable performance if these same bodies had not been entirely silent when the Constitution was amended in ways that were, by any honest measure, more consequential to the very principles they now invoke.

The Constitution was adopted in 2013 and has since been amended twice.

Constitution of Zimbabwe (Amendment No. 1) Act in 2017, fundamentally altered how the most senior judges are appointed. Amendment No. 2 Act in 2021, extended the sitting Chief Justice’s tenure and reshaped the architecture of judicial independence.

On neither occasion did ZHOCD, ZCBC and ZCC issue a pastoral message. On neither occasion did they file a submission. The shepherds were asleep.

The Covenant They Claim To Guard

The churches’ own theory of their authority is the theory that condemns them.

They deliberately call the 2013 Constitution a “covenant”, sacred, perpetual, binding on conscience, and ZCC expressly claims the office of watchman of Ezekiel 3:17. Very well.

If the Constitution is a covenant, then every material amendment to it is a covenantal event, and one does not guard a covenant selectively.

One does not stand over the sanctuary on the days the lighting is favourable and abandon the post when it is not. The selectivity is not only historical. It is textual.

The Bishops cite Romans 13:10, that “love does no wrong to a neighbour,” as a call to reject the Bill, yet the same chapter opens with an instruction the churches conspicuously omit: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1).

The verse is invoked when it constrains the State and laid aside when it grounds the legitimate exercise of parliamentary power.

A church that reads its own scripture selectively cannot claim to be reading history neutrally.

2017 and 2021: The Amendments They Slept Through

Consider what Amendment No. 1 Act of 2017 actually did. The 2013 Constitution, as originally enacted, established a deliberately public mechanism for the most senior judicial appointments.

Under the original section 180, the Judicial Service Commission advertised vacancies, conducted public interviews, prepared a shortlist and submitted it to the President, who was bound to appoint from it.

Amendment (No. 1) Act, 2017 dismantled that mechanism at its apex: The Chief Justice, Deputy Chief Justice and Judge President of the High Court would no longer be selected through public interviews, but appointed by the President after mere consultation with the Commission, consultation he was not bound to follow. The most powerful judicial offices in the Republic were removed from public scrutiny and returned to executive gift.

This was first introduced and passed by the National Assembly in 2017, while Robert Mugabe was still President. On the churches’ own logic this was a covenantal event of the first order.

It touched judicial independence, the separation of powers, and the structural safeguards that the 2013 Constitution was specifically designed to entrench.

The covenant was altered at its most sensitive joint, and the shepherds did not stir. Not one pastoral message was issued. Not one submission was filed.

If 2017 was a covenantal event, 2021 was a covenantal earthquake. The Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 2) Act, 2021 extended the constitutional retirement age of Constitutional Court and Supreme Court judges, with the direct and intended effect of prolonging the sitting Chief Justice’s tenure.

It was processed during the COVID-19 lockdown, when public participation under section 141 was more constrained than at any moment in our constitutional history.

The single loudest objection in all four of the 2026 submissions is that Amendment No. 3 extends the tenure of sitting officeholders and so offends section 328(7).

Yet the extension of the Chief Justice’s tenure under the Amendment No.2 was the precise factual matrix that produced Mupungu v Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs & Ors (Judgment No. CCZ 07/21), in which the Constitutional Court determined whether extending a sitting judge’s age limit offended section 328(7).

The constitutional question now presented as a self-evident outrage was contested all the way to the apex court only five years ago, and the churches were nowhere to be found. They did not file, preach or sign.

The Amendments Are Not Merely Comparable. They Are The Same Objection.

It will be said that Amendment No. 3 is broader than its predecessors, and that scale justifies the difference in response.

The text refutes it. Clause 15 of the Bill amends section 180 by repealing subsections (3), (4), (4a) and (5) and providing that judges are appointed after consultation with the Judicial Service Commission.

The Bishops’ Conference opposes this clause as a grave threat to judicial independence. But that ship sailed in 2017, with the churches watching from the harbour in silence.

The 2013 requirement of public interviews and binding shortlisting was already abolished for the Chief Justice, Deputy Chief Justice and Judge President by Amendment No.1 Act. Clause 15 does nothing more, in principle, than extend to the rest of the bench the appointment model that the churches permitted at the very summit of the judiciary nine years ago without a murmur.

If it was constitutionally tolerable in 2017 for the Chief Justice, Deputy Chief Justice and the Judge President to be appointed after non-binding consultation, with no public interview, on what principle is it a covenant-shattering emergency in 2026 for the same method to reach a High Court judge?

One does not get to sleep through the appointment of the head of the judiciary by executive discretion and then wake, nine years later, to declare that the same method applied to a puisne judge is the death of judicial independence.

The objection, if it was ever sound, was sound in 2017. It was not made then. It cannot honestly be made for the first time in 2026 as though the intervening history did not occur. Even if it had been made, the point would now be moot.

The principle did not change between 2021 and 2026, nor did the Constitution’s text on these questions become more sacred. What changed is not the principle but the political identity of the moment.

A conscience roused by the politics of an amendment rather than by its principle is not a moral conscience. It is a political instrument wearing a cassock.

A Moral Voice, Or an Opposition In Vestments?

There is a reason the law and the wider society extend to the church a particular deference, and it is worth naming precisely, because the churches have spent that deference recklessly.

Religious institutions are mediating institutions, trusted to speak across the political divide and to confine themselves, in the public square, to peace, fairness, transparency and inclusivity.

That is why a pastoral statement is heard differently from a press release, and why its abuse is so corrosive.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference declares it acts “not as a political actor” but as a “moral voice,” then marches clause by clause announcing “we oppose.”

The only clause it declined to oppose outright, the amendment to section 212, it merely raised “concern” about.

That is not the cadence of moral guidance. It is the cadence of a parliamentary opposition at committee stage.

An institution that places itself in the political arena by its own choice must be answered there, on the merits, without the immunity the clerical collar was never meant to confer on partisan advocacy.

Tellingly, a larger body read the same Bill and reached the opposite conclusion.

The Zimbabwe Indigenous Interdenominational Council of Churches, representing denominations with a stated membership exceeding eight million Zimbabweans, submitted to Parliament on 16 May 2026 in support of the Bill.

It makes the elementary point the opposing bodies never confront: section 117(1) vests legislative authority in Parliament, section 117(2)(a) expressly confers the power to amend the Constitution in accordance with section 328, and section 119(1) obliges Parliament to protect the Constitution.

A submission is an input, not a veto.

The contrast is illuminating. Reasonable people of faith, reading the same text, plainly differ.

That is the surest proof that the opposing churches’ stance is not the indivisible voice of the Christian conscience, but one contestable political view in religious dress.

The Goose, The Gander, And The Gate Left Open

The strongest argument is the one built on history and fact, because it cannot be answered, only confessed. The history is true. ZHOCD, ZCBC and ZCC are entitled to their view of Amendment No.3 Bill.

They are not entitled to present that view as the timeless and apolitical voice of conscience while the public record shows a conscience that was, on two prior and graver occasions, soundly asleep.

What is good for the goose is good for the gander. A principle invoked against Amendment No.3 Bill but withheld from Amendments Nos.1 and 2 in 2017 and 2021, respectively, is not a principle. It is a position.

And a church that has chosen, by its own hand, to enter the political arena as the opposition that Zimbabwe’s moribund politics no longer otherwise supplies, must be met there as an opponent, with the full and unsentimental rigour of the law, and with the historical record laid open for all to read.

The watchman who waved through the first two intruders has no standing to raise the alarm over the third, and demand the house be evacuated.

He has standing only to explain, to the people whose gate he was paid to guard, why he was silent the first two times.

Until that account is given, the honest course for the churches is the one their own scriptures commend in the mouth of every false witness: to be still. Constitutional interpretation belongs to the Constitutional Court, not to the council of bishops.

Lawmaking belongs to Parliament, not to the pulpit. And moral authority belongs only to those who spend it consistently, not to those who discover their conscience precisely when, and only when, it serves the politics of the hour.

Nomuzikayise Ngwenya is a legal practitioner and the Group Strategy Lead at the International Centre for Political Campaigns. Her work spans political campaign strategy, political communications and war-room operations across Africa.