A transactional political economy in Zimbabwe fosters corruption and dependency, as loyalty to power trumps democratic principles, disenfranchising everyday citizens.

Zimbabwe's political economy in 2026 is less a system of institutions than a marketplace of transactions, a bazaar where authority is bartered through money, favours, jobs and protection. What passes for governance is not the impartial application of rules but a choreography of patronage, a transactional calculus that has hollowed out democratic practice, corroded the economy, and reduced citizenship to fragile dependency.

In this marketplace, loyalty eclipses competence, and public resources are siphoned into private networks of power. Contracts, fuel licences, mining concessions and land allocations are not instruments of development but tokens of proximity to authority, distributed as prebendal spoils to those who bankroll or shield the regime.

The consequence is a polity marked by inefficiency and corruption, where the ordinary citizen is perpetually precarious, excluded from recognition, denied ownership, and trapped in a cycle of invisibility.

Zimbabwe's institutions are not decaying by accident; they are being deliberately repurposed, stripped of principle and redeployed as instruments of elite survival. What emerges is not governance but capture: a system that thrives on exclusion, sustains itself by keeping recognition perpetually out of reach, and normalises corruption as the very grammar of political life. In this order, the state is no...