BY Nomuzikayise Ngwenya and Karabo Ngoepe.
Drive through Kuwadzana Roundabout in Harare this week and a billboard meets you, plain and unadorned, with a question and an answer. The question is whether you know that term length is not the same as term limit. The answer is in the small print, two section citations beneath the headline: section 95(2)(b) and section 91(2) of the Constitution.
It is a modest piece of out-of-home advertising. It is also one of the more interesting interventions in our public life in recent months, and it is worth pausing on why.
For the better part of a year, the conversation about the Constitution of Zimbabwe (Amendment No.3) H.B.1. Bill, 2026 has been conducted almost entirely in slogans. Supporters and detractors alike have reached for the easy phrase, the political shorthand, the conclusion without the working. What has been missing is the text. Not the text in summary, but the text itself: the actual words of the Constitution, the section numbers, the provisions in their precise wording.
The billboard at Kuwadzana asks the passing motorist to do something unusual. It asks them to read.
Two provisions sit at the heart of the question the billboards raise. Section 95(2)(b) governs how long a single term of office of the President, as an institution, lasts. Section 91(2) governs how many terms a President may serve, and the minimum length of each term. The two work together, but they do different things. One sets the duration of the electoral cycle. The other caps or limits the number of the cycles. A change to the first is not, by definition, a change to the second, and vice versa.
That distinction is not a clever lawyerly trick or semantic sophistry. It is the architecture the Constitution itself has put in place, and the Constitutional Court has read provisions of this kind in precisely those terms. In Mupungu v Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs and Ors CCZ 7/21, the Court approached the textual relationship between provisions like these with a discipline that supports the reading the billboards make visible. A term length provision and a term limit provision are not interchangeable. They are different drafting tools, doing different constitutional work.
That is the affirmative case. What the billboards do, with admirable economy, is put that affirmative case in front of the public so that the public can read it for themselves.
The reaction has been instructive.
The conversation on the streets
On one side of the response, ordinary commuters and online observers have begun, perhaps for the first time in this debate, to refer to sections by number. Posts have appeared on social media in which passing motorists describe the billboard, name the sections, and conclude that the constitutional argument has finally come to the streets. A working lawyer’s thread, widely shared, walked through the distinction without prompting and without ambiguity. Term length is one thing, the thread observed; term limit is another; the two-term cap stays where it is. The billboards have surfaced, rather than supplied, the legal answer.
A parliamentary contribution from one of the Bill’s supporters captured the same point in a different register, suggesting that the legacy of the liberation struggle was secured by universal franchise, not by any specific term structure. That argument is for the parliamentary record, and the speaker can carry it. The narrower point to make is that the billboards themselves do not enter the sovereignty debate at all. They draw a distinction. The distinction is between two provisions in the same Constitution. That is all.
What the words actually say
On the other side of the response, the criticism has been pointed. Some have suggested that the billboards distort the clear meaning of section 328 of the Constitution, and that the term length and term limit distinction is a sleight of hand. The accusation is serious. It deserves a serious answer, and the answer is in the words of section 328 itself.
Section 328(7) of the Constitution reads, in its entirety:
Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, an amendment to a term-limit provision, the effect of which is to extend the length of time that a person may hold or occupy any public office, does not apply in relation to any person who held or occupied that office, or an equivalent office, at any time before the amendment.
The opening words of that subsection do most of the work. The no-benefit rule, as it has come to be known, attaches to “an amendment to a term-limit provision”. It does not attach to an amendment of a term length provision. The text says what it says. Where the Constitution intended to reach term limit provisions, it named them. Where it intended something wider, it would have said so.
About the authors:
Nomuzikayise Ngwenya is a legal practitioner and the Group Strategy Lead at the International Centre for Political Campaigns. Her work spans political campaign strategy, political communications and war-room operations across Africa.
Karabo Ngoepe is a journalist with over 15 years of experience in political, investigative, and human interest journalism who specialises in pan-African politics with a particular interest in SADC and Global South news. He is a former CEO of Rubicon Media Group in Eswatini.
