The government has found a new enemy. It’s neither hunger nor corruption. It’s not the crumbling clinics that turn the sick into corpses either. It’s tint.
Permanent Secretary for Presidential Affairs and Devolution, Tafadzwa Muguti, announced that motorists should strip their windows bare. The logic is that drugs hide behind tinted glass, so the drugs will vanish once the glass is exposed.
This is how it always begins. A visible object becomes the stand-in for an invisible disease. You cannot legislate despair or unemployment, so you legislate shade. You cannot fund rehab clinics, so you fund roadblocks. A young man breaks under the weight of joblessness, he smokes crystal meth, and somehow the car window becomes the villain.
The drug crisis is real. Reports say over half of adolescents were already using some substance by 2019. Crystal meth is cooked in backrooms, codeine is sold at tuckshops, alcohol flows like water. Parents are terrified. Schools are warzones. Rehab centers are overrun. But clinics are understaffed. Teachers underpaid. Families underfed.
Instead of facing the darkness in the community, the government chooses to ban the tint on a Toyota.
Imagine the path this opens. Today tint, tomorrow sunglasses. Next pockets, because “criminals hide weapons.” Then curtains, because “criminals hide fugitives.” Privacy itself will be criminal. Step outside with shaded eyes and you’re an enemy of the state. A citizen with a pocket is a suspect. A house with curtains becomes a safe house.
Absurdity is never absurd to a government desperate to appear strong.
Tint is not protection for drug lords. It is protection from the sun. It is privacy in a society that surveils the powerless and excuses the powerful. The rich will keep their convoys with impenetrable glass. The police will not stop them. They will stop kombis, civil servants, and the ordinary citizen. Fines will be paid, bribes demanded, film stripped on the roadside while the real cartels keep trading. A ban that pretends to fight drugs will end up feeding the same corrupt food chain.
There is a deeper cruelty here. Tint is symbolic. It creates the illusion of progress, a visible act in the fight against an invisible monster. But addiction is not a monster you can peel off glass. It lives in the stomach that has known hunger. It lives in the youth whose degrees rot at home. It lives in a country where dreams are imported and only despair is manufactured locally.
Strip every window in Zimbabwe and the drugs will still be there, waiting in the alleyways and the bloodstream.
The darker truth is that visibility is a fetish of weak states. They believe if they see you, they control you. They believe addiction can be solved by surveillance. Yet what does it mean to see everything if you still choose to do nothing? A clear window does not create jobs. It does not build clinics. It does not return lost hope. It only exposes the powerless to more scrutiny.
The absurd march will continue. You can feel it. Tint today. Sunglasses tomorrow. Pockets next. Curtains after. Each step justified with the language of safety. Each step tightening the circle of control.
Until finally we all live exposed, stripped, transparent, our lives as bare as untinted glass.
And still the drugs will remain.
Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo is an independent social justice activist and writer. He can be contacted on WhatsApp/Phone (+263780022343) or email kumbiraithierryn@gmail.com. You can read more of his articles on https://zealousthierry.art.blog/
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