On the morning of 28 March 2026, more than sixty Zimbabweans gathered at Witton Park in Blackburn, Lancashire, to march against Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 3 and the so called ED2030 agenda. I was one of them. The full account of the day, including the official list of participants on which my name appears, has been published by the Zimbabwe Human Rights Organisation here: https://zhro.org.uk/15-105km-walks/240-the-diaspora-walks-and-the-regime-listens

We came from cities across England. Some had travelled the night before and slept in nearby accommodation simply to be at the start line. The weather did everything in its power to discourage us. Cold rain. Hail stones. Wind that cut through every layer. None of it mattered. We walked anyway. We walked because for many of us in that crowd, this is not theory. This is the country we left.

I will not pretend that the diaspora marches in the abstract. I left Zimbabwe because the Zimbabwe ZANU PF built had no place for the kind of life I wanted to live. Many of those walking beside me carried the same story in different shapes. Political violence. Economic collapse. Families scattered. Years of silence about why we left, told only inside our own homes. Marching together at Witton Park was the first time in a long time that those silences became a single voice. That is what ZHRO’s Walk for Freedom does. It turns scattered grief into organised refusal.

The walk was about a specific bill, and the bill must be named clearly so that no one can pretend confusion later. CAB3 strips Zimbabweans of the direct right to elect the President. It hands that right to a parliament whose own legitimacy collapsed when the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission refused to publish the ward level results of the 2023 general election. CAB3 retrospectively extends presidential and parliamentary terms from five years to seven, gifting Mnangagwa another stretch in office without ever asking the people for it. CAB3 transfers voter registration from the Electoral Commission to the Registrar General, an office that answers directly to the executive. CAB3 creates a new Electoral Delimitation Commission whose chair and members the President appoints himself. CAB3 expands the Senate by ten seats, all of them filled by presidential appointment. This is not constitutional reform. It is the dismantling of the 2013 social contract by the very man who replaced Robert Mugabe.

What happened after the march told us more about the regime than any of our speeches did. Within hours, unnamed government sources began appearing in pro ZANU PF outlets, confirming that Harare was actively gathering intelligence on march participants, monitoring diaspora movements and considering legal action against citizens accused of “collaborating with foreign actors.” Pro regime publications then ran the usual smears, suggesting that activists had been paid to march and that the entire walk was a “regime change” operation. Read those words again carefully. A handful of Zimbabweans walked through hail in a Lancashire park, and the response from State House was surveillance and threats. That is not the response of a confident government. That is the response of a regime that knows it has lost the argument and has nothing left except intimidation.

This is what scholars now call transnational repression. The use of state intelligence and legal threats by a foreign government to silence its own nationals living abroad. Mnangagwa is no longer satisfied with controlling the streets of Harare. He wants to control the parks of Blackburn. He cannot. He will not. Britain is not Borrowdale, and the people walking those routes did not flee one regime simply to obey it from a distance.

The diaspora has no vote in Zimbabwean elections. That exclusion is deliberate, because ZANU PF knows exactly how we would vote if we were ever allowed to. Walking is what is left to us. Writing is what is left to us. Speaking is what is left to us. So we will keep walking. We will keep writing. We will keep speaking. Every kilometre is a vote we were never granted. Every step is a sentence the regime cannot redact.

We are not loud because we are angry. We are loud because they tried to make us silent. CAB3 must be rejected. The 2013 constitution must be defended. And the diaspora, watched and smeared by the very state that drove us out, will not stop until Zimbabwe is free.