By Tinashe T. T. Mpasiri | 9 September 2026
On 9 September 2016, a conversation unfolded on the Friends of Shabanie Mashaba Mines (FOSMM) WhatsApp platform.
Ten years later, the screenshots resurfaced as a Facebook memory.
The setting matters. FOSMM brought together people concerned with the affairs and legacy of Shabanie Mashaba Mines. Yet that afternoon, the conversation travelled beyond the company into a broader inquiry: how should public power be exercised?
Mutumwa Mawere posed a deceptively simple question:
“Who must rise when Mugabe falls?”
One participant responded that any Zimbabwean capable of leading the country towards prosperity, abiding by the Constitution and upholding the rule of law, could do so.
My response was four words:
“Any is no one.”
A decade later, those words carry a meaning I appreciate more clearly.
“Any Zimbabwean” describes a category. It does not identify the human being who must accept responsibility, exercise authority and account for decisions made in public office.
The conversation soon demonstrated why that distinction mattered.
Beyond the successor
Zimbabwe in 2016 was already preoccupied with what would happen after Robert Mugabe.
But Mawere kept pushing beyond the identity of a possible successor.
When would this person rise? How would he govern? Would he be guarded? Where would he live? Would he occupy State House?
What appeared to be questions about a prospective president were really questions about the relationship between an officeholder and public power.
Another participant raised the concentration of consequential roles around the presidency, including Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces and Chancellor of state universities.
The discussion was therefore moving away from the personality of a successor towards something more enduring: how authority should be distributed, exercised and constrained.
Then came an important proposition:
“Strong institutions should be given mandates to stand as constitutional pillars and should act independently and within the constitution.”
Ten years later, I would refine that proposition.
Institutions do not act. Human beings acting through them do.
A Constitution may establish offices, distribute authority and prescribe limits, but those provisions ultimately require human agency. An official must respect a boundary. A judge must exercise judgment. A regulator must apply a mandate. A public officer confronted with an unlawful instruction must decide how to respond.
Institutional strength therefore becomes visible through the conduct of the human beings entrusted with institutional authority.
To rule or to govern
Perhaps the most striking contribution in the exchange came shortly before one participant left the conversation:
“If u rules will become a prisoner but if u govern with the law and respect it u will deliver accordingly.”
The language was informal WhatsApp language. The proposition was substantial.
There is a distinction between ruling and exercising public power under law.
The person who rules may begin to understand authority through personality. Constitutional government requires a different understanding: authority attaches to an office, originates from an identifiable legal source, exists for particular purposes and carries defined limitations.
The officeholder is temporary.
The authority is entrusted, not owned.
This distinction matters because occupying public office does not transform a human being into the institution itself. Nor does acquiring political authority convert public power into personal property.
When the hypothetical became history
Fourteen months after that conversation, Robert Mugabe resigned as President of Zimbabwe on 21 November 2017.
The hypothetical had become history.
Someone did, indeed, come after Mugabe.
But history also revealed why the original question could never be sufficient.
Succession tells us who occupies an office next. It does not, by itself, tell us how public power should be exercised.
That inquiry survives every change of officeholder.
The enduring questions are therefore less about personalities and more about constitutional architecture: What authority accompanies an office? Where does it originate? For what purpose was it conferred? What limits accompany it? Who exercises countervailing authority? What mechanisms provide accountability?
Those questions remain relevant regardless of the name of the person occupying the office.
From succession politics to power literacy
Reading the exchange today, I recognise an inquiry that I would now describe as power literacy.
Power literacy requires us to look beyond titles and personalities and interrogate the architecture beneath authority.
When a human being exercises public power, what permits that person to act? What precisely may that person do? Where does that authority end? What happens when the boundary is crossed?
These questions extend beyond presidents. They apply wherever authority is entrusted to human beings — ministers, legislators, judges, regulators, public officials and others whose decisions affect the interests of fellow citizens.
That is what makes this ten-year-old conversation worth revisiting.
It is not significant because it predicted who would succeed Robert Mugabe. It did not.
Its significance lies elsewhere.
It captured a conversation gradually moving from who should exercise power towards how power itself should be understood.
On 9 September 2016, the question was:
Who must rise when Mugabe falls?
Ten years later, the question that interests me more is what that conversation was really asking:
What should govern the exercise of public power, regardless of who occupies the office?
The answer cannot depend upon personality.
Public authority must be understood by reference to its source, purpose, limits and the accountability accompanying its exercise.
That is the journey from succession politics to power literacy.
