Africa at 63: Let us stop celebrating and start accounting!
Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) Africa Day Statement 2026
ZimRights joins Africa and Zimbabwe in observing Africa Day. This year the theme is “Water and Sanitation as Continental Political Priorities.” Sixty-three years ago, in Addis Ababa, the founders of the Organisation of African Unity made a covenant with the African people, that this continent would govern itself with dignity, justice, and solidarity. Today, ZimRights honours that founding moment, and breaks from the tradition of ceremonial celebration to ask, with urgency and honesty, what has become of that covenant?
Africa holds 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land and has major river systems like Congo, Nile, Zambezi, and Niger. Yet according to UNICEF and WHO’s 2023 Joint Monitoring Programme, over 400 million Africans lack access to clean drinking water, and nearly 700 million lack safely managed sanitation. Children continue to die from cholera and typhoid, which are diseases that other continents have eradicated long ago.
The fact that water must be declared a continental political priority in 2026 is itself an indictment. ZimRights’ People’s Human Rights Manifesto asserts that access to clean water and sanitation is a fundamental entitlement of every African person. The fact that governments must still be persuaded to treat it a development aspiration after 63 years of independence reveals a profound contempt for ordinary African lives which is embedded in the architecture of African governance.
As we commemorate this Africa Day, ZimRights also laments the widespread leadership crisis that has seen pervasive power without accountability across the continent. Military coups have swept through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, and Gabon in recent years. These coups have been greeted in many quarters with relief and not with horror. The fact that citizens prefer the uncertainty of the barracks to the certainty of civilian plunder is not a sign of desperation. The Ibrahim Index of African Governance recorded continued deterioration in security and rule of law across the Sahel, with participation and human rights declining in 60% of assessed countries over the past decade.
The African Union, mandated to be the guardian of this continent’s democratic promise, has too often responded with declarations that echo in empty chambers. Its principle of non-indifference remains more aspiration than action. ZimRights’ Manifesto demands transparent, accountable institutions at every level of governance, institutions that serve people, not protect elites. Until the AU holds member states to that standard consistently and consequentially, Africa Day risks being little more than a pageant for the powerful.
The cruellest irony of our moment is that the gravest physical danger to many African migrants comes not from outside the continent, but from within it. ZimRights notes with concern the recurring atrocity of Afrophobia in South Africa. Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Somalis, Nigerians, Malawians, to mention but a few have faced waves of murderous violence in the name of curbing illegal immigration, and this happening under the watchful eye of the state. It seems that this is the harvest of deliberate political manipulation where leaders who find it easier to direct popular anger at the foreign Black body
than to account for their failure to provide water, electricity, and employment to their own people. ZimRights’ Manifesto affirms the right to human dignity regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or migration status. An attack on any African in Africa is a desecration of Africa Day’s meaning. Afrophobia must be named, prosecuted, and stopped.
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.
The People’s Human Rights Manifesto is unambiguous, every Zimbabwean has the right to participate freely in governance, to organise without fear, and to hold leaders to account through credible democratic processes. These are not foreign impositions. They are the unfulfilled promises of our own liberation.
Zimbabwe’s youth, educated, capable, and ambitious, are leaving emigrating in their thousands, not from lack of love for their country, but because their does not love them back!
We refuse to end in despair, because Africa is not only its pain. Africa is the community health worker in rural Zambia who slashed child mortality through sheer will. The feminist lawyer in Accra dismantling discriminatory law in hostile courts. The journalist in Harare who publishes truth knowing the cost. The grandmother in Bulawayo who organised her neighbours to sink a community borehole because the municipality has failed.
Water in the tap. Ballots that count. Courts that stand. Children who sleep safely. These are not utopian demands. They are the minimum that 63 years of independence should have already delivered. They are what the OAU’s founders promised. They are what the African Union must now be held to account for building.
We call on the African leaders to introspect on their mandate to the people – and act now to correct it!
To the people of Africa, the continent is yours to claim and to build!
Aluta Continua. Victoria e Certa.
Issued by the Information Department
info@zimrights.org.zw
www.zimrights.org.zw
