President of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa
Zimbabwe has taken a decisive step toward the third amendment of its 2013 Constitution. On Thursday the National Assembly passed the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 3) Bill on its third reading by 216 votes to 42, well clear of the two-thirds of the chamber's membership that an amendment to the Constitution requires.
The Bill now advances to the Senate, and once it has cleared that House, to the President for assent.
The margin in the lower House was emphatic, and it sets the tone for what follows. The arithmetic now passes to the Senate, where the Bill must again command a two-thirds majority. It does so carried by a decisive vote in the House that first considered it.
The Bill was gazetted as House Bill 1 of 2026 and brought to the National Assembly for its second reading by the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Ziyambi Ziyambi, who presented it as a single, coherent package of changes rather than a collection of unrelated tweaks. What followed was one of the longer constitutional debates the current Parliament has seen, running across sitting days through the first half of June. By the Minister's own account on the floor, every member who wished to speak was able to do so.
