The Leadership Question in the Transitional Justice Struggle
17 April 2026, Cape Town, South Africa
The Struggle Behind the Struggle
By Dzikamai Bere I dzikamai@civicleadershipinstitute.com
“We are all blind until we see
That in the human plan
Nothing is worth the making
If it does not make the man.
Why build these cities glorious
If man unbuilded goes?
In vain we build the world, unless
The builder also grows.”
— Edwin Markham
1. Introduction: What I Heard in This Conference
Over the last few days, we have made a deep dive into the state of transitional justice on the continent. We have returned, thirty years later, to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, not as an object of nostalgia, but as a site of unfinished instruction: a place from which to think again about truth recovery, victim participation, acknowledgement, accountability, reparations, and the larger moral labour of democratic repair. The symposium itself has asked us to think about both legacy and unfinished business. This panel asks us to consider Southern Africa, a region where engagement with the past has often remained uneven, politically contested, and institutionally constrained.
As I listened over these days, a number of insights come to the forefront.
“The journey continues if there is a constituency to drive it.” Yasmin Sooka.
“We must see truth commissions as society providing leadership to complex situations.” Barney Afako.
“I reject the notion that transitional justice must be state-led. The state can have the first bite, but where it is incapacitated, civil society must continue the journey.” Sarah Kasande.
“Protection of Civil Society is important as part of advancing transitional justice.”
These insights leave us with a hard question beneath the institutional question. If the journey continues only when there is a constituency to carry it, if truth commissions are one way in which society attempts to provide leadership to moral and political complexity, if civil society must continue where the state is unable or unwilling, and if civic space itself must be defended for that work to remain possible, then our conversation will be unfinished if it does not address the transitional justice leadership question.
That is the question I want to place before us as we prepare to get back to our respective action zones.
2.0 The State of Transitional Justice in Zimbabwe
2.1 Here is a quick update on the state of transitional justice in Zimbabwe
Like many African societies, Zimbabwe is dealing with the transitional justice question that goes back to the colonial era.
- The liberation war which delivered black rule in 1980 failed to dismantle the architecture of violence. As a result, two years into independence, the black government deployed this architecture of violence to commit the Gukurahundi atrocities in the Midlands and Matebeleland Provinces.
- Other atrocities followed – Food Riots in 1998, Operation Murambatsvina which displaced over 700 000, 1999 – 2000 farm displacements which displaced over 1.2million people, 2017 military coup, 1 August 2018 military killings, etc
- Attempts at redress have included the War Victims Compensation Fund, the Chihambakwe Committee of Inquiry, the 1997 Unity Accord, the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission, The traditional leaders Gukurahundi hearings, The Zimbabwe Independent Complaints Commission etc
- Civil society initiatives have included the CCP & LRF Breaking the Silence Intervention, the Catholic Church engagement with the leadership of ZANU PF, the Zimbabwe we want, the establishment of the National Transitional Justice Working Group, and now many scattered initiatives by organisations and individuals including music, paintings, film, memorialisation projects etc
2.2 The Looming Transitional Justice Despair
The transitional justice movement in Zimbabwe is at its weakest since 1980. But this reflects more the state of civil society as a whole. The transitional justice movement exists within the broad civil society ecosystem.
- There is no political appetite for an authentic transitional justice process. What exists is are attempts to capture the space and implement pseudo transitional justice process as seen by the resource starvation on independent commissions and the taking over of Gukurahundi hearings by the executive through traditional leaders.
- Civil society is in disarray due to the global rapture and the restrictive operating environments.
3.0 What we can do about it
My proposition is simple: the crisis of transitional justice in Southern Africa is not only a crisis of political will. I think ultimately what we call political will is a leadership issue. At two levels. The state, and civil society.
We often say that states lack political will. That may be true. But political will, on its own, explains very little. Political will is not a natural resource that one discovers underground. More often, it is produced through organised pressure, public memory, civic imagination, and social leadership. Justice rarely advances because power suddenly becomes generous. It advances because societies organise themselves in such a way that denial becomes unstable, avoidance becomes costly, and truth becomes harder to suppress. That is why the question before us is not only what governments have failed to do. It is also what we have failed to do.
Thoughts from the last few days tell us that we need an empowered constituency to move the train. We need society to provide leadership. Where the state fails, we need civil society to move. And this is were we are getting stuck. So, how do we unstuck ourselves here.
3.1 The State of Transitional Justice Leadership
While I may speak to the Zimbabwean situation, it is probably true that the situation is the same across Africa.
Sometime last year, as I prepared to step down from my previous role from the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, I started a series of conversations with leaders in the sector. The question was very simple – what are you going through?
Leaders said these are the battles we are facing:
- State hostility
- Deep isolation
- Extreme exhaustion
- Executive loneliness
- Resource scarcity
- Crisis of ethical leadership
In short, they said, we feel like we are in a constant state of firefighting. At a time when the global elites are closing the space, capturing the technology for organising and withdrawing resources from social justice movements – we are going through a rupture.
In 2025 alone, 17 civil society organisations lost their executive directors. Many of these – it was not leadership transition – it was leadership flight – leaders simply saying – I don’t see a way out.
Many boards are sitting today and don’t know if their director is going to turn up.
This is a leadership crisis and a movement like this will not deliver. We speak of victim fatigue. We speak of donor fatigue. Well, now we must talk about leadership fatigue.
4.0 What Can We Do About It
Over the course of six months, we brought together a group of civic leaders to reflect on this. This process gave us what we are calling the Seven Shifts of the New Civic Renaissance. How can we respond to the ongoing rupture and see in it an opportunities for rebirth. From these, I wish to propose and 5 shifts that the people in this room can begin to think of as a way of responding to the crisis and seeing the rebirth of a more vibrant transitional justice movement. The Shifts ask what kind of operating system civil society now requires if it is to survive the rupture of the present and lead responsibly into the future.
4.1 Shift One: From the Occassional Heroism of Madiba to an Intentional Transitional Justice Leadership Pipeline
Southern Africa has been blessed with courageous figures in the justice struggle: survivors who refused silence, lawyers who documented abuse, clergy who opened moral space, organisers who held communities together, scholars who kept memory alive, commissioners who carried hard truths into public view. But a struggle that depends too heavily on exceptional individuals is always fragile. When such people tire, are attacked, retire, are co-opted, or pass on, the work weakens with them.
The future of transitional justice in our region cannot depend on heroic survivors and exceptional advocates alone. We must build a deliberate leadership pipeline for the transitional justice struggle. We must ask whether we are multiplying courage across generations, whether we are mentoring younger organisers, whether we are building institutional memory, whether we are preparing successors, whether we are reproducing the moral and strategic capacities the struggle will still require twenty years from now.
This is not a romantic concern. It is a structural one. Recent work by ICTJ on civil society-led truth-seeking argues that because formal mechanisms such as truth commissions are temporary, activists must think carefully about how the seeds planted by an initiative will continue to bear fruit after the formal process ends.
When I sit here and listen to Yasmin Sooka, I ask myself – what must we do now so we can have many of her in the future?
4.2 Shift Two: From Episodic Leadership Development to Grounded Leadership Accompaniment
Here is where architecture matters for us in civic leadership. Many times, I like to call myself ‘the accidental leader’. I found myself in a leadership role due to my good activism. Well, infact it was a birthday speech I gave at my brother’s birthday that one of the lawyers came to me a said, “You must join us.” This story repeats itself at several levels in different journeys and arenas to different leaders. We find ourselves in leadership roles without adequate preparation. Many times, the response is ‘Go on a fellowship’ or get a leadership qualification. While leadership development is important in giving us the basic skills, our authoritarian setting will benefit from something more – grounded continuing accompaniment in the action zone. We must thus begin to think of what systems of accompaniment can we put in place for leaders who are battling deep isolation in the action zone and are looking of the way out. I have started to see the seeds of this accompaniment emerge in spaces like these where I had the privilege to spent time with seasoned leaders, sharing stories from the struggle and getting direct access to call when the arena become hot and unbearable.
I think universities have a profound role to play. Universities can become partners in leadership accompaniment. They can go beyond traditional leadership development and become companions to community transitional justice leadership and innovation. They can convene and remain present. They can research and remain accountable. They can host archives, support public memory, accompany local leadership processes, incubate new models of repair, and offer reflective and institutional shelter to communities doing the difficult work of moral reconstruction.
4.3 Shift Three: From Wellness Routine to a Radical Infrastructure of Care
This field asks extraordinary things of people. It asks survivors to narrate pain in public. It asks communities to remember what they were once told to bury. It asks activists to organise through fatigue. It asks researchers, clergy, psychosocial practitioners, artists, lawyers, and civic leaders to remain morally present in the face of denial, impunity, and unresolved violence.
And yet, even now, care is too often treated as optional, private, secondary, something to be attended to after the real work is done. A wounded movement cannot carry a wounded society toward justice.
Recent African scholarship on mental health and psychosocial support in transitional justice argues precisely this point: that psychosocial support should not be treated as an add-on, but integrated into the architecture of justice processes themselves. It also warns against detached and overly individualised understandings of trauma, and calls for participatory, community-grounded models that recognise collective resilience and context.
If civic space must be protected, then those who carry this work must also be protected. If the constituency must continue the journey, then the constituency must have places where it can rest, grieve, reflect, recover, and be renewed. Otherwise we will keep asking exhausted people to carry unfinished nations.
4.4 Shift Four: From Elite Leadership to Community-Rooted Leadership
When we were reflecting on this, it became difficult. We were faced with a situation were activism has been over professionalised. We asked ourselves – who is a leader in the social justice struggle? Who is a legitimate leader? After much reflection, we agreed that the leader is he or she that is in the dust of the action zone, fighting for the communities. Over the years, the struggle has fallen victim to elite capture. I had a conversation last time with a global development group that asked me to nominate community leaders for a fellowship. I went to the action zone and picked two young people. On was working with the vendors and another was working with domestic workers. They did not make it. The feedback I got was that they wanted people who did not have access to previous opportunities. I did not push. Later, when that group published the people who had won the fellowship on a fancy website, I just could not believe. The elite professional young people whose only claim to leadership is good English and a cure face. The following year, that group reached out to me again asking for nominations and I replied that I am not doing that. Why, leaders, why are we doing this? Why are we capturing everything for the elite, the western graduates when the communities that need this are ingnored? The future of this movement, requires that we make the shift from elite leadership to community-rooted leadership.
4.5 Shift Five: From Rigid Civic-Political Boundaries to Fluid Pathways of Public Leadership
This may be the most uncomfortable Shift, but I think it is indispensable. In Southern Africa, transitional justice often gets trapped at the level of moral witness. Civil society speaks, documents, organises, commemorates, litigates, and resists. But the actual levers of implementation often remain elsewhere: in commissions, parliaments, ministries, courts, executive offices, security institutions, and other sites of public power.
Too often we then treat civic leadership and public leadership as though they inhabit morally separate universes. The civic actor is expected to remain pure outside power, while power itself remains untouched by the justice imagination.
But the question is not whether leadership moves. It always does. The question is whether it moves ethically, transparently, and in service of the mission.
Some leaders will remain in civil society. Some will serve in commissions. Some will enter mediation spaces. Some will work in policy. Some will take up responsibilities within public institutions. A mature transitional justice ecosystem must be able to think seriously about these pathways without collapsing either into naïve purity or into crude opportunism.
This is important because transitional justice is not merely a technical field. It is a political and institutional struggle over truth, recognition, redistribution, accountability, and the terms on which societies live together after violence.
So we must stop treating the boundary between civic leadership and public leadership as a moral wall. The question is not whether leaders move. The question is whether they carry their ethics with them.
5.0 What the Five Shifts Reveal
These five Shifts suggest that the leadership question is not peripheral to transitional justice in Southern Africa. It is the struggle behind the struggle. It is the struggle to ensure that justice does not depend on a few exhausted heroes.
It is the struggle to ensure that institutions, including universities, do not merely host conversation, but accompany communities.
It is the struggle to ensure that care is built into the architecture of justice work.
It is the struggle to ensure that legitimacy flows from people and communities, not only from procedure.
And it is the struggle to ensure that civic imagination can travel into public power without losing its soul.
This, I believe, is where the Southern African conversation must now move. We must move beyond asking only whether states are willing, and begin asking whether society is organised, formed, accompanied, rooted, and strategically positioned to continue the journey.
Conclusion: What This Moment Requires of Us
The great gift of this conference has been that it has not allowed us to speak of transitional justice as a closed chapter. It has reminded us that the work remains unfinished. But unfinished work requires unfinished people to keep carrying it. It requires institutions willing to stay in the struggle. It requires scholars who do not only analyse from a distance, but who are willing, in humility, to walk with communities. It requires civic actors who can multiply leadership, sustain moral energy, remain rooted in the people, and enter the difficult terrain of power without surrendering their ethics.
If the journey continues only when there is a constituency to drive it, then our task is now clear.
We must build that constituency.
We must accompany that constituency.
We must protect that constituency.
And we must lead.
And that is the struggle behind the struggle that we are battling at the Civic Leadership Institute.
Dzikamai Bere is the Convener and CEO of the Civic Leadership Institute (CLI). This presentation was prepared for the TRC@30 Symposium, acknowledging the role of leadership in driving transitional justice on the continent and inviting a conversation on what needs to be done to raise a new generation. Comments on this article can be sent to dzikamai@civicleadershiinstitute.com If you wish to engage with any of our leadership accompaniment engagements, visit our website on www.civicleadershipinstitute.com or download our active engagements brochure available here.
