The Bulldozer Can Flatten a House. It Can’t Flatten Demand

By Tinotenda Bhunu

HARARE – THERE is a particular kind of silence that follows a demolition. The bulldozer itself is loud enough, but it is the quiet afterward that truly unsettles. A house—built from years of saving, sacrifice, and hope—collapses into a pile of bricks. A family stands where their living room used to be. Furniture lies scattered everywhere. Someone crouches in the rubble, searching for important documents. And somewhere amid that wreckage sits a question Zimbabwe still hasn’t really answered: what happens to property rights when the state shows up with a bulldozer?

Zimbabwe’s recent wave of demolitions, targeting houses and structures deemed illegal, has reopened an old and uncomfortable debate about land, housing, and the rule of law. The official justification is a familiar one: illegal structures need to go; planning laws must mean something; wetlands, road reserves, and public spaces deserve protection; and local authorities cannot simply allow settlements to spring up outside the law indefinitely.

Fair enough. No functioning society can run a planning system where people build wherever they like and then demand legal recognition after the fact.

But that is only half the story.

The people watching their homes disappear are not always the ones who built the illegal land market in the first place. Many are ordinary Zimbabweans who spent years saving, bought their stands through what they genuinely believed were legitimate channels, built brick by brick, and moved in thinking they had finally achieved something that has become increasingly difficult in this country: owning a home.

For those families, the bulldozer is not just removing an illegal structure. It is destroying an asset. It is wiping out years of accumulated savings. It is taking away a sense of security—and sometimes, it is shattering the very idea that property ownership means anything at all.

This is where the conversation stops being about demolition and becomes something bigger: a debate about property rights themselves.

A property right is not simply the right to occupy a piece of land. It is the expectation that ownership will be recognised, protected, and governed by rules you can actually predict. It means that if you legally acquire something, you should not have to spend your life wondering whether an administrative policy shift will turn it into rubble.

None of this means property rights are absolute, because they are not. You cannot buy land and decide planning regulations no longer apply to you. You cannot build on a road reserve just because you have already spent money on construction. You cannot put a house on a wetland and then wave “property rights” at anyone trying to enforce environmental law. But there is a real difference between enforcing the law and enforcing it only after an illegal system has been allowed to flourish for years.

The crisis did not start with the first bulldozer

Zimbabwe’s housing shortage has been building for a long time. Urban populations have grown faster than the formal system could handle. Waiting lists have stretched on and on. Legally acquiring serviced land has become harder for ordinary households to afford, and formal developments often demand deposits well beyond what low-income families can raise.

Where the formal market fails to meet demand, an informal one steps in. That is basic economics. When people want something badly enough and the legal supply is choked off, someone, somewhere, finds a way to supply it anyway. That is how informal settlements grow—and also how land barons find their customers.

The tragedy is that the land baron often understands this market better than the government does. He knows there are thousands of Zimbabweans desperate for a stand. He knows they cannot afford the formal alternative. He knows bureaucracy can drag on for years while an informal deal gets done in an afternoon. And, perhaps most importantly, he knows people will pay good money just for the possibility of owning a home.

So the deal happens. Money changes hands, a stand gets allocated, a house goes up, and the family moves in. For most buyers, this is not some act of rebellion against the state; it is usually just desperation. And then, years later, the bulldozer arrives.

Who is actually responsible? This is where things get murky. If land was illegally allocated in the first place, who bears the blame? The family that bought the stand? The person who sold it to them? The officials who let the allocation slide? The political networks that sometimes look the other way? The local authority that never provided enough serviced land to begin with? Or is it the entire institutional system that let an illegal property market become normal?

It is tempting to pin all the blame on the homeowner, largely because the homeowner is the easiest person to find. The land baron can vanish. The corrupt official can deny everything. The political patron who offered protection often walks away untouched. But the homeowner is the one standing in front of the bulldozer. That raises an uncomfortable possibility: the person easiest to punish may not be the person most responsible for the mess in the first place.

A serious government needs to draw a line between the architects of illegal settlements and the people caught inside them. That distinction matters just as much economically as it does morally.

Think about what a family actually loses when their house comes down. It is not just bricks and cement. It is years of income diverted into construction. Labour from family members who helped build it. Furniture bought slowly, piece by piece. Schooling disrupted when the family gets displaced. The quiet psychological value of finally having somewhere permanent to call home. In plain economic terms, demolition destroys accumulated capital—and Zimbabwe cannot afford to keep losing capital.

For decades, Zimbabweans have been told to build, save, and invest. Yet a property environment where households cannot trust that their investment will be protected pushes people in exactly the opposite direction. Why invest? Why build? Why save at all, if the rules governing what you own can change overnight?

This is not just a concern for lawyers, economists, or people with large landholdings. It matters to the person building a two-roomed house in Epworth. To the young couple buying their first stand. To the informal trader putting money aside to build. To the farmer investing in improvements. To the Zimbabwean abroad sending money home to construct a house for the family. The entire economic system rests on people believing that what they build today will still belong to them tomorrow.

A house is capital, not just shelter

That is one of the most important things secure property rights do: they turn wealth from something fleeting into something you can accumulate, transfer, and invest. A house is not merely a roof over your head. It is capital. It can be rented out, used as collateral, passed down to children, sold when cash is needed, or leaned on for security in old age.

When property rights feel secure, people invest in what they own. When they don’t, the incentives flip entirely, and people start focusing on bare survival instead of building anything at all.

That is why Zimbabwe’s demolition debate should not be flattened into a simple fight between those who back law enforcement and those who oppose it. The real question is whether Zimbabwe can enforce planning law without destroying people’s confidence in property rights altogether.

The Constitution itself recognises this. Section 71 protects the right to acquire, hold, occupy, use, transfer, hypothecate, lease, or dispose of property, while also allowing for compulsory acquisition in accordance with the law. That last part matters. Property rights do not mean the government can never touch your property. They mean any interference has to happen through the law, not around it.

Due process is not a formality. This is where due process stops being a technicality and starts being the whole point. A government that demolishes an illegal structure after following a proper legal process is doing something fundamentally different from a government that simply sends in machinery and lets the bulldozer act as judge, jury, and final court of appeal. That is not a small difference. It is the difference between the rule of law and rule by power.

If someone has broken planning regulations, they should be able to say exactly which regulation they broke, what remedy exists, what notice they were entitled to, and what process will actually determine the outcome. Predictability matters here more than almost anything else, because the real danger to property rights is not a government that regulates property—it is a government whose rules you simply cannot count on.

Which brings us to the harder question: Can a government really claim to be restoring order if it is fixing years of its own institutional failure by making ordinary citizens absorb most of the cost? If a local authority knows illegal land allocations are happening, enforcement should start the moment the first illegal sale takes place, not after thousands of houses have already gone up. If land barons are selling land they do not own, they should be prosecuted. If officials are facilitating the allocations, they should be investigated. If political figures are protecting illegal settlements, they should be held to account. If councils are not providing enough serviced land, that system should be fixed. If getting planning approval takes so long that people are effectively pushed into informality, the process should be simplified.

And if there is a genuine public interest in removing a structure, the people affected still deserve to be treated according to the law. Otherwise, demolition becomes a substitute for governance.

Two true statements. The government says the house is illegal. The homeowner says they paid for the land. Both of those statements can be true at the same time—and that is precisely why you cannot solve this by simply picking a side. Yes, the homeowner may have acquired the property unlawfully. But the fact that the transaction was unlawful does not answer the deeper question of who created the conditions that made it possible in the first place.

That is the paradox running through Zimbabwe’s informal housing market. The state can declare a house illegal, but it cannot declare away the economic forces that produced it. As long as there is too little affordable formal housing, too little serviced land, expensive compliance processes, and a population desperate to own something of their own, informal alternatives will keep appearing. Tear down today’s informal settlement without fixing tomorrow’s housing shortage, and all you have done is set the stage for the next one. The bulldozer can flatten a house. It cannot flatten demand.

That is why demolition alone can never be the long-term answer. Zimbabwe needs a housing system where legality is genuinely within reach for ordinary people. That means expanding the supply of serviced land, speeding up and opening up planning approvals, cutting unnecessary regulatory friction, making property registration affordable and efficient, going after land barons instead of just their customers, and holding local authorities accountable both for illegal development and for failing to offer legitimate alternatives in the first place.

Most of all, it means rebuilding the credibility of property rights. Because when a Zimbabwean builds a house, there should be more than bricks holding that investment up. There should be confidence. Confidence that the rules are known in advance. Confidence that a title or permit actually means something. Confidence that disputes get resolved by institutions, not machinery. Confidence that the law will be applied consistently. And confidence that tomorrow’s policy will not quietly turn today’s investment into a crime.

It is easy to look at a demolished house and see nothing but an illegal structure. We should also see the economic story sitting underneath it. Someone bought the bricks. Someone sold the cement. Someone dug the foundation and moulded those bricks by hand. Someone transported the materials. Someone skipped holidays and worked extra hours to save for construction. Someone wired money home from South Africa, Botswana, the UK, or Australia. Someone believed that after years of hardship, they were finally building something that would last. That is what makes the bulldozer so brutal. It does not just knock down walls. In a matter of minutes, it can wipe out years of accumulated economic effort.

Zimbabwe absolutely needs planning laws, functioning councils, environmental protection, and orderly urban development—and yes, it needs to confront illegal land allocation head-on. But it also needs something deeper than enforcement: a culture where property rights are predictable, enforceable, and genuinely respected.

Because the real test of property rights is not whether the state recognises ownership when it is convenient to do so. The real test comes when the state wants that property gone. That is the moment the rule of law actually matters.

So the question Zimbabwe needs to answer is not simply whether a particular house was legal. It is whether the process used to destroy that house was itself lawful, predictable, and just. No country can build a prosperous economy while treating private investment as permanent only until the next bulldozer shows up. When property rights end at the bulldozer, investment, trust, and economic freedom start ending right along with them.

Tinotenda Bhunu is an economist by profession. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinotenda-bhunu-114645208?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app