When the late Blessed Geza warned that “a Constitution is only as strong as the people willing to defend it,” he was issuing a political forecast.

Geza said authoritarianism sometimes arrives wrapped in legality, through amendments, procedures and compliant institutions that hollow out a Constitution while insisting they are acting in its spirit.

What matters, he said, is not the language used by those in power, but the direction of travel.

That warning resonates now.

The proposed constitutional changes are being presented as technical reforms, stability, efficiency, continuity.

Yet their cumulative effect is to sever the citizen from power: removing the direct election of the president, concentrating control of elections, insulating judicial appointments from public scrutiny, and expanding executive influence over Parliament itself.

This is precisely the scenario Geza cautioned against, a constitutional order that still exists on paper, but no longer restrains power in practice.

Geza often invoked the liberation struggle as a moral benchmark. He took every chance to remind Zimbabweans that independence was not gifted; it was claimed because ordinary people refused to accept that injustice, once normalised, should be endured quietly.

If the generation of the 1960s and 1970s had accepted that minority rule was legal, entrenched and too powerful to confront, Zimbabwe would still be colonised today.

That history raises an uncomfortable question for the present generation:

If our fathers and grandfathers took a stand against the violation of their dignity and future, what does it say if we accept the violation of our Constitution in silence?

The liberation movement understood something fundamental, that legality without justice is oppression by another name. The Constitution was meant to be the post-liberation shield against exactly that outcome. To allow it to be mutilated under the guise of reform is to betray not only a document, but the struggle that made it possible.

This moment is not small, or technical. And it is not for lawyers alone.

It is a defining test of whether Zimbabweans believe sovereignty truly resides in the people.

The call to action is civic, lawful and urgent: to speak, to organise, to demand accountability, and to insist that no generation has the right to mortgage the future of the next. Blessed Geza’s words endure. History will record