There is a special kind of arrogance required to defend Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 3 by invoking the history of African disenfranchisement. Yet that is precisely what the regime’s propagandists are now doing. They walk us through the colonial statute books, from the Cape of Good Hope law of 1891 to the British South Africa Company orders of 1894 and 1898, from the six African voters allowed in the 1922 referendum to the 429 permitted in 1953, and they ask us to see CAB3 as the next chapter in a long story of liberation. Anyone with even a passing memory of what this country has lived through should recognise the manipulation immediately.

The bill does not advance the principle of one person one vote. It quietly retires it. Under the proposed framework, the most powerful office in the land may eventually be filled not by the citizens of Zimbabwe but by a parliament that ZANU PF already dominates and is now openly purchasing through the cash distributions of its preferred businessmen. This is the Coghlan model of 1923 in modern dress. A Prime Minister selected through a parliamentary process by a chamber from which the majority of the population was excluded. The colonial legislators of that era used race to lock the African out of the decision. The legislators of today will use party discipline, patronage and intimidation to lock the citizen out. The mechanism differs. The outcome is identical.

The propaganda is even more shameless when it claims that CAB3 is somehow a gift to the opposition. We are expected to swallow the idea that Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has spent decades dismantling every meaningful challenge to his authority, has suddenly developed a tender concern for the survival of rival political parties. This is not a serious proposition. It is a sedative, designed to make a power grab feel like a reform. The amendment exists for one reason. It exists to preserve a single man in office beyond the limit the constitution placed on him, and to engineer a system in which his network can outlast any election the public might still be allowed to participate in.

Equally familiar is the smear that the opposition has spent its existence defending White economic interests and inviting sanctions on the country. ZANU PF has run this script since the late 1990s, deploying it against Morgan Tsvangirai, against trade unionists, against student leaders, against journalists, against pastors, against anyone who dared to organise outside the party’s grip. It is the rhetorical equivalent of a rubber stamp. Reach for the sanctions narrative whenever a difficult political question arises. Brand the questioner a traitor. Move on. The script is so worn that even those reading it from the page no longer believe it. It survives only because the regime has nothing else to offer.

What is most revealing about this defence of CAB3 is the company it forces ZANU PF to keep. To justify the bill, the regime must rehabilitate the very parliamentary architecture the colonial state used to exclude Africans from power. It must argue, in effect, that an indirect, parliament driven selection of leadership is consistent with the values of the liberation struggle, when in truth that model is precisely what the struggle was waged to overturn. The Bantu Rhodesian Voters Association, the early nationalists of the 1930s, ZAPU in 1960, ZANU in 1963, the cadres who took up arms thereafter, none of them fought for the right to be ruled by a chamber of bought politicians. They fought for the ballot in the hand of the citizen.

That ballot is what CAB3 quietly removes. Everything else in the propaganda is decoration.