25/05/2026
Africa at 63: Let’s Stop Celebrating and Start Accounting
ZimRights Africa Day Statement – 25 May 2026
Sixty-three years ago, African leaders made a promise in Addis Ababa that this continent would govern itself with dignity, justice, and solidarity. So today, ZimRights observes the Africa Day we are not celebrating, we ask honestly, what happened to that promise?
This year’s theme is "Water and Sanitation as Continental Political Priorities." Africa has 60% of the world’s uncultivated farmland and massive rivers like Congo, Nile, and Zambezi. Yet over 400 million of us still don’t have clean drinking water. Nearly 700 million lack safe toilets. Children are still dying from cholera and typhoid—diseases the rest of the world solved long ago. The fact that we must declare water a “continental political priority” in 2026 is itself a shameful indictment.
As we commemorate this Africa Day, ZimRights also laments the widespread leadership crisis that has seen pervasive power without accountability across the continent. The coups that have swept Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Gabon have been largely met with relief, and not horror. This is because life under corrupt civilian leaders has become so unbearable that the barracks feel safer than civilian plunder. The African Union talks about “non-indifference,” but where is the action, and where are the results?
The cruellest irony of this Africa Day is that the gravest physical danger to many African migrants comes not from outside the continent, but from within it. In South Africa, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Somalis, Nigerians, Malawians have been attacked is spates of recurring Afrophobia, while the South African state watches. Leaders find it easier to turn anger against a fellow African than to explain why they can’t provide water, jobs, or electricity. An attack on any African in Africa is an attack on Africa Day itself!
ZimRights cannot speak of Africa's crises without speaking plainly of our own home. Zimbabwe is a nation of remarkable people governed by a system that has perfected survival at citizens' expense. Forty-six years after independence, the water crisis is not metaphor, but it is daily reality. Harare, the capital city, routinely goes for weeks without running water. Cholera has become perennial. When civil society names these failures, the state's response is labelling rather than remediation. ZimRights has documented systematic assaults on democratic space, the effect of the Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Act in gagging human rights defenders, arbitrary arrests of activists, harassment of journalists, suppression dissenting voices in light of the Constitution Amendment Bill number 3. Freedoms of assembly, expression, and association, rights enshrined in Zimbabwe's own Constitution, are routinely violated with impunity.
But we refuse to end in despair because Africa is also the community health worker in rural Zambia who saves children through sheer will. The feminist lawyer in Accra fighting discriminatory laws. The journalist in Harare who tells the truth knowing the cost. The grandmother in Bulawayo who organized her neighbours to sink a borehole because the municipality failed.
Africans today need; clean water from the tap, ballots that actually count, courts that stand for justice and children who sleep safely. All these are not utopian dreams. They are the bare minimum that 63 years of independence should have delivered.
To African leaders - look in the mirror and fulfil your promise.
To the people of Africa - This continent is yours to claim and build.
Aluta Continua. Victoria e Certa.
Issued by the Information Department
[email protected]
www.zimrights.org.zw
