Chiefs and other traditional leaders are unelected, hereditary figures who serve as the primary local governance structure in rural areas, acting as custodians of cultural values, customs, and communal land while also performing administrative and judicial functions within their communities. In rural Zimbabwe, chiefs control land allocation and access to communal resources and resolve disputes.
Section 281(2) of the 2013 Constitution emphatically provides that traditional leaders must not be members of any political party or in any way participate in partisan politics or act in a partisan manner or further the interests of any political party. Clause 20 of CAB3 would repeal s 281(2).
However, what you may not know or appreciate, is that the Lancaster House agreement was never fully 'completed' as the petition clearly makes plain to the readers of both history and the corruption of CAB3.
Chief Ndiweni frames the present moment as the irrevocable breakdown of the Lancaster House Agreement of 21 December 1979. Industrial-scale corruption, the collapse of the rule of law, and — decisively — the current administration’s shredding of the 2013 Constitution have, in his account, nullified the settlement on which independent Zimbabwe was built. He records that the proposition of a two-state solution is not new: it was raised at Lancaster House itself by the late Paramount Chief Khayisa Ndiweni, who warned that a unitary state forced upon two historically distinct nations risked “crafting another failed African state.”
Within three years of independence, that warning was vindicated by genocide.
A Nation with a History and a Lineage
The Matabele Nation is part of the greater Nguni grouping of Southern Africa. Chief Ndiweni traces its foundation to King Mzilikazi of the Royal House Khumalo, who departed the Zulu kingdom in 1823 and, over a seventeen-year journey through what are now South Africa, Botswana and Zambia, built a nation by assimilation before establishing his kingdom between the Zambezi and the Limpopo by 1840. He was succeeded by King Lobengula, whose reign was overtaken by the discovery of gold, the fraudulent Rudd Concession, and the war with Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. Lobengula was never captured, killed or made to surrender; he disappeared into the landscape in 1893 — a fact, Chief Ndiweni argues, that has sustained the Nation’s sense that it was never truly defeated.
The Jameson Line and the Historical Two-State Reality
Central to Chief Ndiweni’s argument is that the territory was, in historical fact, two states divided by the Jameson Line — Matabeleland and Mashonaland — a division reaffirmed by the peace negotiated between the Matabele and Rhodes after the 1896 uprising. Even under colonial administration, he records, the two retained separate high courts, reserve banks, state houses, economic systems and traditional-leadership structures. The unitary state of 1980 was therefore an imposition upon a pre-existing dual reality, not a natural unit.
Gukurahundi: Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes
Chief Ndiweni records that within three years of independence the ZANU-PF administration unleashed, between 1983 and 1987, a campaign against the Matabele Nation that he characterises as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. He cites estimates of some 40,000 killed, over 100,000 women and girls raped, over 350,000 maimed or injured, and more than one million displaced. He notes that President Emmerson Mnangagwa has been consistently identified by independent commentators as having played a central role, that the perpetrating administration remains in office, and that these crimes have never been addressed in any court of law. He rejects “constructive engagement” as political appeasement, insisting that only a proper international court process can address crimes of this gravity.
The co-petitioners adopt his essential point of cause: the genocide was not an aberration within an otherwise sound system. It was the instrument of a political project — the imposition of a unitary, one-party state by the destruction of ZAPU as an independent force and the subjugation of the people it represented. The genocide and the one-party-state philosophy are inseparable.
The Capture of Traditional Leadership and the Monarchy
Chief Ndiweni documents a sustained, decades-long effort by the administration to capture the institution of traditional leadership — in breach of the 2013 Constitution, which expressly bars traditional leaders from partisan politics — because the rural population, some 78% of the country, follows its chiefs at the ballot box. He describes the resuscitation of the Matabele monarchy: the long search through archives in Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and London for the rightful heir among “the Four Boys” of King Lobengula; the June 2026 discovery at Denstone College confirming the schooling of Prince Nguboyenja (Christopher Lobengula); and the private coronation of HRM King Bulelani KaLobengula on 28 September 2018. He contrasts this with the administration’s alleged promotion of a rival claimant, Peter Zwide Khumalo, through a High Court challenge in Bulawayo, which he frames as a politically motivated attempt to install a compliant monarch.
Denstone College, Staffordshire — September 1908. An African pupil is seated at the far left of the second (chair) row, among an otherwise all-white school assembly. Per Chief Ndiweni’s account, College archives identified in June 2026 record this pupil as Christopher Lobengula — the baptismal name of Prince Nguboyenja, one of “the Four Boys” of King Lobengula. The identification is that of the College archive and of Chief Ndiweni; reproduced here as supplied.
The co-petitioners draw no independent conclusion as to the identity of the pupil shown. They note only the documented fact relied upon in Chief Ndiweni’s account: that a prince of the House of Lobengula was educated within the British establishment in this period — a circumstance which, on his argument, demonstrates that the colonial authorities themselves understood the royal succession to run through “the Four Boys.”
The Demand: A Two-State or Strong Federal Settlement
Chief Ndiweni’s conclusion is unambiguous. The Matabele Nation now seeks either an independent state, or a strong federal state as near to independence as possible — and nothing in between, with its monarch serving as a constitutional monarchy. He draws the analogy of the dissolution of the USSR into fifteen states and the emergence of South Sudan in 2011, arguing that the right to self-determination recognised by the African Union and the United Nations applies to the Matabele Nation. He stresses the position is not academic but the single most consequential political question in the country.
The co-petitioners present this position faithfully as that of the Matabele Nation through its Traditional Prime Minister. The coalition is broad, and not every co-petitioner adopts the two-state solution as its own preferred outcome; what all co-petitioners share, and jointly affirm, is the underlying principle — that a durable settlement for Zimbabwe must genuinely devolve power rather than merely relocate it at the centre, and that the right of Zimbabwe’s peoples to determine their own future must be recognised. We do not ask the international community to impose any particular structure upon Zimbabwe. We ask that this principle, and the historical record set out in the Appendix, be given the serious consideration they demand.
Therefore read the full petition HERE [Click this Link]