The lawyers have spoken with one voice, and the verdict is damning. The removal of Jessie Majome from the chairmanship of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission is unconstitutional, unprocedural and unlawful. Senior advocates, the Constitution Defenders Forum, civil society and every Zimbabwean lawyer who has read Section 237 of our supreme law have reached the same conclusion. There is no longer any serious legal debate about what Mnangagwa did. The only remaining question is what kind of country allows a President to behave this way and walk on as if nothing has happened.

The constitution is not vague on this matter. It is, in fact, almost cruelly specific. The chairperson of any independent commission may be removed from office only on four narrow grounds. There must be an inability to perform functions, whether by physical or mental incapacity. There must be gross incompetence. There must be gross misconduct. Or there must be ineligibility for appointment in the first place. None of these grounds was alleged against Majome. Not one. There was no claim of incapacity, no charge of incompetence, no accusation of misconduct, no question of eligibility. There was simply a press conference she gave that the President did not like, and a few days later a memo demoting her to an ordinary commissioner of the Public Service Commission.

The procedure for removal is just as exact. The constitution requires that the procedure used to remove a judge must also be used to remove a member of an independent commission. That means the matter must be referred to a tribunal. The tribunal must consist of a chairperson and at least two other members, drawn typically from the legal profession. The tribunal must investigate the alleged grounds. The chairperson under threat must be given a full opportunity to respond, in keeping with the right to a fair hearing that this same constitution guarantees to every citizen. The tribunal must then submit its findings and recommendation to the President. And the President is bound by that recommendation. He does not write it. He does not edit it. He acts on it.

None of this happened. There was no tribunal. There was no investigation. There was no hearing. There was no recommendation. There was only the unilateral will of one man, dressed up in a press statement signed by his Chief Secretary. Mnangagwa appointed himself the accuser, the judge, the jury and the executioner in a single press release, and called the result a reassignment.

Understand what this means for the rest of the country. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is established under the same protective architecture as the Human Rights Commission. So is the Gender Commission. So is the Anti Corruption Commission. So is the Media Commission. Every one of them depends, for its credibility, on the same constitutional guarantee that has just been ripped up in public. If the chair of one independent commission can be discarded for telling the truth, then every chair of every commission now serves at the President’s pleasure rather than the country’s mandate. Their independence has become a polite fiction. Their reports are now drafts the President may approve or reject. Their findings now carry the weight of whatever Mnangagwa decides to do with them.

This is the deeper damage. The Majome case was never only about one woman, no matter how courageously she spoke. It was about whether the institutions our constitution created to stand between the citizen and the abuse of state power still actually stand. After what was done to her, that question answers itself. They do not. They have been reduced to the personal staff of a President who governs by decree and calls it law.

The country must refuse to normalise this. A constitution that can be ignored at will is no constitution. A commission that can be gutted by memo is no commission. And a President who breaks the law in order to break the people who guard the law is no longer governing within the constitution. He is governing in spite of it.