At 5am on August 14, bulldozers rolled into St Martins Extension, a Harare suburb, and began flattening homes. Residents like Methro Masunga — a single mother who spent five years washing dishes and doing laundry to save for a stand she began paying for in 2015 — watched their investments turn to rubble. The city says it was enforcing planning regulations against illegal construction. Residents say they bought their land through council-linked processes and received official allocation letters. The scale is significant. City council records list more than 5,000 houses facing demolition under 37 outstanding High Court orders. A council task force has separately inspected 22,255 sites for structures on prohibited or unauthorised land. The individual losses are brutal: Joachim Nhete invested more than $10,000 of his retirement package into a home that no longer exists, with no insurance to recover it. The legal picture is genuinely complicated, but the complication itself is the indictment. A consent order issued on October 29, 2025 by Justice Happias Zhou barred the City of Harare from evicting named applicants or demolishing their homes without a valid court order. Residents say demolitions proceeded anyway without a superseding order. The council insists it only demolished structures not covered by the ruling. The gap between these claims — and the absence of clear records to resolve it — is the pathology. The deeper rot is structural. A 2019 commission of inquiry chaired by Justice Tendai Uchena found that land barons had sold state land without authority, sometimes allegedly working alongside council officials. The commission's report has never been published. The Harare Residents' Trust wrote to the president on July 22, 2026 demanding its release. A separate commission into the city's governance crisis has also gone unimplemented. The pattern is familiar: inquiry, report, shelf, repeat. Zimbabwe's Constitution under Section 74 prohibits demolition of homes without a court order made after considering all relevant circumstances. The National Human Settlements Policy requires alternative accommodation before relocations. Residents say they were offered neither due process nor alternatives. Some have erected makeshift shelters on the sites of their former homes. Others have returned to renting — losing years of savings and starting over. The accountability gap runs in one direction. Minister Daniel Garwe said the government did not carry out demolitions and could not interfere with court processes, while acknowledging the council holds approximately 5,000 demolition orders. Mayor Jacob Mafume told residents with approved plans to produce them during inspections but declined to comment on the legality of the St Martins demolitions specifically. The burden of proof falls entirely on people who cleaned houses and sold street food to afford their homes. Harare South MP Trymore Kanopula has called for a halt to further demolitions pending an audit. Parliament's speaker referred the matter to the Ministry of Local Government and Public Works. But for Masunga, Chengeta, and Nhete, these gestures arrive after the bulldozers. The system that sold them land, issued them letters, and collected their payments has now destroyed what they built — and no one in that system has been held accountable for either the selling or the destroying.
