Minister labels drugs a security threat, but Zimbabwe’s real battle is only beginning
by BERNARD CHIKETO
“THIS problem is increasingly impacting our youth and not only undermining public health, safety and national productivity, but also becoming a security threat.”
The warning, delivered by Advocate Misheck Mugadza, the Minister of State for Provincial Affairs and Devolution for Manicaland, landed with the weight of a police baton.
Then he offered a number that stripped away the usual bureaucratic gauze. “One in every 30 households,” Minister Mugadza told a press conference at his office this week, “is being affected in one way or another.”
The statistic is not conjured from the mountain air. It echoes the findings of the Zimbabwe Livelihoods Assessment, which has recorded that more than half of households identify drug and substance abuse as one of the most serious dangers facing their young.
But it was the minister’s decision to rank narcotics alongside coups and insurgencies—as a “security threat”—that marks an escalation in official thinking.
Zimbabwe can no longer pretend that cheap drugs are merely a public-health nuisance or a moral panic.
The numbers are brutal.
A national survey, cited by Minister Mugadza, shows that 7% of young Zimbabweans report substance use, while 4.5% engage in hazardous drinking and 1.8% do both—a combination that clinicians regard as a reliable predictor of the hardest-to-treat poly-substance disorders.
Manicaland is not merely reflecting these figures; it is leading them.
A 2023 study backed by UNICEF, the first rigorous mapping of adolescent substance abuse in the country, found that the province had the highest prevalence of drug use.
Its illicit pharmacopoeia is grimly familiar: cannabis (67%), codeine-laced cough syrup (47%), crystal methamphetamine (36%), and dangerous illicit brews (31%).
The social wreckage is piling up as fast as the police blotters. The same Unicef-backed study established that about 60% of school dropouts in Zimbabwe are linked to substance abuse. Gang-related violence—70% of which involves schoolchildren—intimate-partner violence and a 40% correlation between drug abuse and suicide attempts complete a picture that is as much a crisis of human development as of law and order.
In a country where formal employment has shrivelled and wages have cratered, cheap narcotics function as both soothing and calming agents for a struggling working class as much as for the idled young.
The government is not idle.
Minister Mugadza, a lawyer by training and a ZANU-PF stalwart who has been a ruling party parliamentarian in Manicaland since 2022, used the press conference to lay out the architecture of the state’s response.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa, he said, remains “deeply concerned”.
In June 2024 the government launched the Zimbabwe Multi-Sectoral Drug and Substance Abuse Plan (2024–2030), an umbrella strategy built on supply reduction, demand reduction, harm reduction, treatment and rehabilitation, psychosocial support, community reintegration, and resource mobilisation.
In Manicaland, this has translated into a blitz of awareness campaigns, the embedding of life-skills education in every school, and community-outreach programmes run in partnership with traditional chiefs and churches.
The First Lady, Auxillia Mnangagwa, has championed an initiative known as Nhanga-Gota—that places a trained facilitators in all school targeting girls and boys separately mirroring traditional social infrastructure.
“Evidence shows that early intervention significantly reduces the likelihood of lifelong addiction,” Minister Mugadza said.
Yet even the most dedicated officials concede that the treatment apparatus is groaning.
Rehabilitation centres in Manicaland, nearly all of them privately run, are “overwhelmed because of the growing population of affected people,” the minister admitted. Many families simply cannot afford the fees.
The state’s answer is an ambitious plan, announced by the Minister of Defence, Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, who chairs the powerful National Committee on Drug and Substance Abuse: a US$5 million fund-raising drive to build at least one public rehabilitation centre in every district.
In Mutare, the provincial capital sites have already been earmarked at Sakubva Psychiatric Unit and on land adjacent to Victoria Chitepo Provincial Hospital.
Every district is guaranteed at least one with some even getting two sites earmarked.
The carrot is accompanied by a heavier stick.
Figures released by the National Committee show that arrests for drug-related offences surged 41% to 19,632 in 2025, while the number of rehabilitation centres nationwide jumped from 48 to 139.
A dedicated drug-enforcement agency has been gazetted, and specialised courts are being prepared.
“There is no room within our security services for those who indulge in or promote such destructive behaviour,” President Mnangagwa told a pass-out parade of correctional officers in November 2025, a remark that reflected simmering fears about the penetration of narcotics into the uniformed forces themselves.
Less comforting for the architects of the crackdown is the finding by the Afrobarometer research network, published in November 2024, that 79% of Zimbabweans believe drug abuse is widespread in their communities—56% call it “very widespread”—and that citizens trust schools, families and churches far more than they trust the police or the courts to fix the crisis.
It is a galling verdict on the institutions now leading the charge.
Minister Mugadza’s address, for all its administrative scaffolding, did not sound like the usual provincial pro-forma.
He spoke as a man who has seen the data and the death certificates.
The language of “security threat” is deliberate: in the official lexicon, it denotes a challenge to the existence of the state itself.
Whether Zimbabwe’s drug epidemic has crossed that threshold is arguable.
What is beyond argument is that it is consuming the country’s most precious resource—its young—at a velocity that should terrify even a government accustomed to perennial crisis.
The district-level clinics, the school counsellors, the First Lady’s Nhanga-Gota, the specialised courts: all are pieces of a response that is belated but, on paper, coherent.
The test, as always in Zimbabwe, is whether the state can deliver on its own promises before another generation is lost to a high that costs less than a loaf of bread.
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