TREVOR NCUBE FOUND HIS VOICE AGAINST CAB 3. WHERE WAS IT WHEN ZIMBABWE’S CIVIC SPACE WAS BEING CLOSED?

Trevor Ncube has recently rediscovered the language of resistance.

He speaks passionately about constitutionalism. He warns about the destruction of democracy. He condemns attempts to manipulate Zimbabwe’s Constitution. He has become one of the loudest critics of Constitutional Amendment No. 3 and President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s attempts to reshape the country’s political architecture.

Those arguments deserve to be debated.

But democracy cannot be defended selectively.

Freedom cannot matter only when the threat reaches your preferred institution, your political interests or your own newsroom.

And that is why the latest decision by ZimInd Publishers to drag 36 employees, including journalists, before the High Court demanding US$100,000 over allegedly defamatory statements raises a deeply uncomfortable question about Ncube’s own relationship with the freedoms he now so loudly invokes.

Because Zimbabwe did not suddenly begin losing democratic space with CAB 3.

The walls had already been closing.

Before the constitutional amendment battles that Ncube now condemns so passionately, Zimbabwe’s civil society was fighting another major threat: the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment law.

The legislation was gazetted amid warnings from human rights organisations, civic groups and international observers that it could severely restrict freedom of association, interfere with civil society organisations and expand executive control over groups that often provide some of the country’s strongest independent voices.

Civil society organisations sounded the alarm.

Human rights defenders spoke.

Lawyers spoke.

Activists spoke.

Organisations warned that the legislation could shrink Zimbabwe’s already fragile civic space and make it more difficult for citizens to organise independently of the state.

The law was eventually gazetted in April 2025.

Yet no intervention from Ncube comparable in prominence or intensity to his later campaign against CAB 3 is evident in the public material reviewed for this article.

That contrast deserves interrogation.

Because press freedom and civic freedom are not separate struggles.

When government restricts NGOs, activists and civic organisations, journalists eventually feel the consequences.

When citizens lose the freedom to organise, independent media lose sources, watchdogs and institutions capable of challenging state power.

When governments acquire wider powers over organisations that scrutinise them, democracy itself becomes weaker.

You cannot defend the newsroom while ignoring the shrinking public square outside it.

And you certainly cannot condemn political attempts to intimidate speech while appearing comfortable with methods that may themselves create fear among people speaking about conditions inside your own organisation.

ZimInd Publishers has now sued 36 employees, including journalists, for US$100,000.

According to the company’s court case, the dispute arose from an all staff meeting chaired by Ncube in March 2026.

The company alleges that employees were instructed not to use their phones while Ncube addressed them and that material from the meeting subsequently appeared on different platforms.

ZimInd says statements circulated by employees falsely portrayed Ncube and the company as cruel, insensitive and unwilling to pay outstanding salaries.

Those allegations are disputed and must ultimately be tested through the legal process.

No journalist has a constitutional right to deliberately defame another person.

No employee is automatically immune from accountability simply because they work in the media.

But that is not the end of the conversation.

The company is not merely asking the court to determine whether statements were false.

It is demanding US$100,000.

It wants retractions.

It wants apologies.

And it wants an order restraining further allegedly defamatory publication.

Thirty six workers are facing one of Zimbabwe’s prominent media companies in the High Court.

What message does that send to every other employee inside that newsroom?

Speak carefully?

Record nothing?

Complain privately?

Do not embarrass management?

Remember what litigation could cost you?

That is precisely why the issue cannot be reduced to Ncube’s legal right to sue.

Power does not cease being power simply because it is exercised privately.

A president possesses political power.

A government possesses state power.

An employer possesses economic power.

A media proprietor possesses institutional power.

And journalists can be vulnerable to every one of them.

Ncube himself should understand this better than most.

He has publicly described the fear that can grip a newspaper when powerful people threaten litigation.

He has previously spoken about NewsDay’s experience after lawyers acting for Mnangagwa challenged reporting concerning the President.

Ncube described fear of costly litigation and the enormous financial consequences that can accompany a fight against somebody considerably more powerful.

That is an important observation.

But principles become meaningful only when they survive a change in position.

It is easy to understand intimidation when you are the one being intimidated.

The harder test comes when you possess the power.

If a massive damages claim can frighten a newspaper when it comes from the President’s lawyers, why should anyone pretend that a US$100,000 claim against ordinary employees cannot have a chilling effect of its own?

The circumstances are obviously different.

Trevor Ncube is not the government.

ZimInd is not ZANU PF.

A civil defamation action is not the same thing as the state arresting, banning or criminalising journalists.

That distinction must be maintained.

But Zimbabwe’s painful experience with repression should have produced a broader lesson than simply “government censorship is bad.”

The deeper lesson should be that societies become less free when powerful institutions create environments in which weaker people become afraid to speak.

That is why this controversy reaches beyond one court case.

Zimbabwe has spent decades watching ZANU PF use law, institutions and political power in ways that journalists and human rights organisations have repeatedly said restrict criticism and narrow democratic space.

The PVO legislation became part of that wider debate.

Civil society organisations warned that it handed government extensive powers capable of interfering with organisations that challenged authority.

Those warnings should have mattered to every serious defender of democracy.

Not just NGOs.

Not just activists.

Journalists too.

Media proprietors too.

Business leaders too.

Every person who now invokes constitutional freedom should have understood that shrinking civic space eventually reaches everyone.

Today Ncube attacks CAB 3 with extraordinary force.

He writes about constitutional destruction.

He condemns intimidation.

He speaks about citizens being silenced.

He warns that Zimbabwe cannot surrender the democratic gains embedded in the 2013 Constitution.

Those are serious arguments.

But Zimbabweans are equally entitled to ask where that same intensity was when civil society organisations were warning that another law was closing the democratic space around them.

And now they are entitled to ask another question.

What democratic lesson is being demonstrated when journalists and employees within his own corporate environment face a US$100,000 lawsuit arising from speech connected to an internal meeting?

Ncube’s political journey makes the contradiction even more striking.

After the November 2017 military intervention, he was among Zimbabweans who believed Mnangagwa deserved an opportunity.

He later publicly described Mnangagwa as the “man for the season.”

He joined Mnangagwa’s Presidential Advisory Council.

Years later he acknowledged that he had been wrong.

Changing one’s mind is not hypocrisy by itself.

Recognising an error is preferable to defending it forever.

But that experience should have produced an uncompromising understanding of what happens when too much power is trusted merely because the person exercising it appears acceptable at the time.

Zimbabwe made that mistake repeatedly.

Institutions were subordinated to personalities.

People tolerated excesses when committed by political figures they supported.

Principles became negotiable depending on who was exercising power.

That is exactly the political culture the country should be trying to escape.

Freedom of expression cannot become situational.

You cannot demand fearless journalism when journalists confront State House and cultivate fear when criticism moves closer to your own office.

You cannot condemn a culture in which ZANU PF uses legal and institutional power against critics while refusing to examine whether your own response to criticism reproduces any of the same chilling dynamics.

You cannot discover civic freedom only when CAB 3 arrives.

Democratic space is either defended consistently or it slowly disappears piece by piece.

First civil society becomes easier to control.

Then activists become more cautious.

Then journalists become afraid.

Then institutions begin self censoring.

Eventually people stop needing to be formally banned because fear has already taught them what not to say.

That is why Zimbabwe’s democratic crisis has never been only about Mnangagwa.

It is also about a culture of power.

A culture in which those at the top often demand freedoms for themselves that they become less enthusiastic about extending to people beneath them.

A culture in which criticism is celebrated when directed outward and resented when directed inward.

A culture in which principle sometimes lasts only until it becomes inconvenient.

Ncube has every right to defend himself against statements he believes are false.

His employees have every right to defend themselves against the claims brought against them.

The courts must determine the legal merits.

But the court cannot answer the moral and democratic question for Zimbabwe.

That question belongs to society.

What kind of media culture are we building if journalists can confront presidents but must fear confronting power inside their own institutions?

What does press freedom actually mean if it exists only when the press is speaking upward towards government?

And what does it say about Zimbabwe’s struggle for democracy if the methods people condemn when exercised against them suddenly become easier to justify when they themselves possess power?

Trevor Ncube is right about one thing in his recent writings: Zimbabwe’s democratic space is in danger.

But defending that space cannot begin and end with CAB 3.

It must include civil society.

It must include activists.

It must include workers.

And it must include journalists, even when what they say makes powerful media owners uncomfortable.

Zimbabwe has had enough of powerful people deciding when freedom should apply.

That principle should bind State House.

It should bind ZANU PF.

And it should bind the newsroom too.