By Tinotenda Bhunu
HARARE – There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a demolition. The bulldozer itself is loud enough, but it’s the quiet afterward that really gets you. A house that took years of saving, sacrifice and hope collapses into a pile of bricks. Families stand where their living rooms used to be. Furniture scattered everywhere. Someone crouches in the rubble trying to find important documents. And somewhere in all 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 have to mean something. Wetlands, road reserves and public spaces deserve protection, and local authorities cannot just let settlements spring up outside the law forever.
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’s only half the story.
The people watching their homes disappear aren’t 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’d finally pulled off something that has become harder and harder to achieve in this country: owning a home.
For those families, the bulldozer isn’t just removing an illegal structure. It’s destroying an asset. It’s wiping out years of accumulated savings. It’s taking away a sense of security, and sometimes, it’s 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 isn’t simply the right to occupy a piece of land. It’s 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 shouldn’t have to spend your life wondering whether some administrative policy shift is going to turn it into rubble.
None of this means property rights are absolute, because they aren’t. You can’t buy land and decide planning regulations no longer apply to you. You can’t build on a road reserve just because you’ve already spent the money on construction. You can’t put a house on a wetland and then wave “property rights” at anyone trying to enforce environmental law. But there’s a real difference between enforcing the law and enforcing it only after you’ve let an illegal system flourish for years.
The crisis didn’t 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’s just 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’s how informal settlements grow. It’s 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 can’t afford the formal alternative. He knows bureaucracy can drag on for years while an informal deal gets done in an afternoon. And, maybe 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 isn’t some act of rebellion against the state. It’s usually just desperation. And then, years later, the bulldozer arrives.
Who’s 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 whole institutional system that let an illegal property market become normal?
It’s tempting to pin all the blame on the homeowner, mostly because the homeowner is the easiest person to find. Those who profited from illegal allocations often remain difficult to identify or hold accountable, while enforcement falls disproportionately on the end-purchaser. The corrupt official can deny everything. But the homeowner is the one standing in front of the bulldozer. And 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 has 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’s not just bricks and cement. It’s 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 a permanent place to call home. In plain economic terms, demolition destroys accumulated capital, and Zimbabwe can’t really afford to keep losing capital.
For decades, Zimbabweans have been told to build, save and invest. Yet a property environment where households can’t 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 isn’t 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 whole 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’s 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 isn’t merely a roof over your head. It’s capital. It can be rented out, used as collateral, passed down to your children, sold when you need cash, 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’s why Zimbabwe’s demolition debate shouldn’t be flattened into a simple fight between people who back law enforcement and people who oppose it. The real question is whether Zimbabwe can actually 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 don’t mean the government can never touch your property. They mean any interference has to happen through the law, not around it.
Due process isn’t 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’s not a small difference. It’s 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 isn’t a government that regulates property. It’s 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’s 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 don’t own, prosecute them. Where officials have been found to have facilitated illegal allocations, they should face investigation and appropriate sanction. The same principle applies to any political involvement in such schemes. If councils aren’t providing enough serviced land, fix that system. If getting planning approval takes so long that people are effectively pushed into informality, simplify the process.
And if there’s a genuine public interest in removing a structure, the people affected still deserve to be treated according to the law. Otherwise demolition just 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’s precisely why you can’t solve this by simply picking a side. Yes, the homeowner may have acquired the property unlawfully. But the fact that the transaction was unlawful doesn’t answer the deeper question of who created the conditions that made it possible in the first place. This is not to suggest that the government deliberately created this situation—only that the underlying causes are structural and require systemic solutions.
That’s the paradox running through Zimbabwe’s informal housing market. The state can declare a house illegal, but it can’t declare away the economic forces that produced it. As long as there’s 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 settlements without fixing tomorrow’s housing shortage, and all you’ve done is set the stage for the next one. The bulldozer can flatten a house. It can’t flatten demand.
That’s 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 won’t quietly turn today’s investment into a crime.
It’s 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’s what makes the bulldozer so brutal. It doesn’t 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 isn’t whether the state recognises ownership when it’s convenient to do so. The real test comes when the state wants that property gone. That’s the moment the rule of law actually matters.
So the question Zimbabwe needs to answer isn’t simply whether a particular house was legal. It’s 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
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