A central unresolved question is whether residents holding allocation letters and agreements of sale also held valid planning and building approvals.
At around 5am on Friday, August 14, Methro Masunga was woken by bulldozers and shouting municipal police officers outside her home in St Martins Extension, a suburb of Harare. The 28-year-old single mother of three first assumed the machinery had arrived for roadworks. It had come to demolish her house, according to Al Jazeera, which spoke to her among the remains of the property.
Masunga's account is one of several in the report that describe years of saving funnelled into a home later destroyed. She says she began paying for a residential stand in 2015, received an allocation in 2019 and saw the arrangement formalised through the city council in 2020, when residents began receiving official documents. Memory Chengeta, a former street food vendor whose house in St Martins was also demolished, and Joachim Nhete, who estimates he invested more than $10,000 of his retirement package in land and construction, describe similar losses. Some displaced residents have returned to renting; others, including Masunga and Chengeta, remain in the area in makeshift shelters.
The dispute turns on how residents acquired their stands and whether the council complied with existing court orders. On October 29, 2025, Justice Happias Zhou issued a consent order in case HCH5444/25 setting aside demolition notices issued to named applicants in St Martins Extension. It barred the City of Harare from evicting those applicants or demolishing their homes without a valid court order. Chengeta told Al Jazeera that the municipal authorities arrived with no order overturning that judgement. The available information does not establish whether Masunga's or Chengeta's specific properties were covered by the order, and the council maintains it did not demolish properties protected by it.
The numbers involved are contested. City council records seen by Al Jazeera list more than 5,000 houses facing demolition under 37 outstanding High Court orders, while a council task force has inspected 22,255 sites to identify structures on prohibited or unauthorised land. The full number displaced across Harare in 2026 has not been independently established. Council spokesperson Stanley Gama told local media that the municipality was targeting structures whose owners had repeatedly been warned against building illegally. Mayor Jacob Mafume said residents with approved building plans should produce them during inspections, while housing director Edgar Dzehonye said the area had not been adequately serviced. Precious Shumba of the Harare Residents' Trust argues that town planning and legal officers nonetheless directed municipal police to demolish homes.
A central unresolved question is whether residents holding allocation letters and agreements of sale also held valid planning and building approvals. An allocation to occupy a stand does not by itself establish that a house was authorised for construction, so the status of the residents' documents, the approved layout and individual building permits will determine whether the demolitions were justified. Zimbabwe's Constitution, under Section 74, prohibits eviction or demolition without a court order made after considering all relevant circumstances, and the National Human Settlements Policy calls for alternative accommodation before relocations. Residents say none was offered. The episode also echoes the 2019 Uchena commission of inquiry, which found unauthorised land sales, weak administration and poor record-keeping by local authorities.
