There is a song by the late Zimbabwean musician Leonard Dembo that I often think about when I reflect on leadership. In the song Yave, Dembo sings in Shona words that I loosely translate to mean:

It is not possible in this life to do everything that you planned to do. When your time is up, there will always be some things that you leave for those who come after you.

The words are simple, but they say something important about life. They are also true of leadership. Leaders begin with a vision, plans and a commitment to leave behind stronger institutions. We identify problems that need solving, set priorities and make promises to ourselves and to the people we lead about what we hope to accomplish. Yet the work remains unfinished. This is also what makes renewal possible. Every generation does what it can and leaves something for the next. We do our part knowing that, when our time is done, someone else will step forward. Every act of leadership we undertake today would make little sense if we did not believe that our work was laying a foundation for those who come next. That belief is what I call faith in the next: the belief that others will build on what we started, repair what we got wrong and imagine things that never occurred to us.

The trap of unfinished business

The difficulty is that unfinished business can easily become a trap. Liz Wiseman, in her book Impact Players: How to Take the Lead, Play Bigger, and Multiply Your Impact, calls these “value decoys”: things that appear useful, but can in fact reduce our impact. We look at everything that remains undone and convince ourselves that our departure must wait. We tell ourselves that there is still too much to do, that a particular project still needs us, that the institution is not ready, or that one more transition needs to be completed before we can leave. These concerns are often genuine. The problem begins when genuine concern for continuity slowly becomes a reason for remaining. We have seen this many times in public life. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe’s long tenure was often tied to the argument that the liberation project remained incomplete. In a very different political context, Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the long-standing American convention of presidents serving only two terms, seeking and winning a third term and later a fourth as the United States faced economic crisis and war. The circumstances were very different, but the underlying temptation is worth noticing: unfinished work can make the continued presence of a particular leader appear necessary.

These histories are not equivalent, but they point to a wider leadership problem: if unfinished business becomes the test for departure, then the conditions for leaving can always be postponed. The same temptation exists outside politics. Founders face it, CEOs face it, pastors face it and civil society leaders face it. There will always be another programme to establish, another funding gap to close, another conflict to resolve, another person to mentor and another strategy to complete.

If completion becomes the condition for leaving, then leaving becomes impossible.

In Part 8 of this series, From Founder to Foundation, I reflected on a conversation with Nani Jansen Reventlow, who has founded organisations and then made the deliberate decision to leave them in the hands of others. In that conversation, Nani put it plainly: there is always something unfinished. That is important to recognise when you are preparing to leave. There will always be something left to do, and the temptation is to remain because you become convinced that you must be the one to do it, or at least that you must personally see it through. But while there will always be more work to be done, part of our responsibility is to build people and systems that can take responsibility for what comes next. Whatever needs to be done today, tomorrow or the day after should not necessarily require you to still be there. This is where faith in the next stops being an abstract idea and becomes a practical discipline.

Continuity

Succession cannot become an afterthought. It does not work to arrive at your final week, suddenly notice everything that remains unfinished, and then try to compress years of knowledge, relationships and institutional memory into a hurried handover. By then, it may already be too late. Building people and systems that allow the work to continue beyond you has to begin much earlier and has to become part of how the organisation works. Leadership development cannot begin when the leader announces their departure, and neither can succession. If continuity depends on a last-minute handover, then it was never really built into the institution in the first place.

Continuity is a muscle, not a moment.

There are leaders who have done this well. Sometimes the loudest stories are those of leaders who refuse to leave, but there are also quieter examples of people who knew when to step aside and did so deliberately. Nani is one of them. Another is my brother in the transitional justice and human rights movement, Arnold Tsunga. Arnold has spent decades in civic leadership, building and leading institutions and then, at different moments, stepping aside to allow others to lead them. During my own transition from ZimRights, I often turned to Arnold. He had been a mentor to me and had played an important part in my own journey; in many ways, he was one of the people who prepared me to lead ZimRights. As I approached my own transition, I felt comfortable reflecting with him about the experience, including the doubts that can come with leaving.

In 2025, Arnold, together with Ennie Chipembere, hosted a leadership symposium for ZimRights’ community leadership teams. During one of our conversations at the symposium, I told Arnold how much I admired the way he had handled his own transitions. He walked me through some of them and acknowledged something that is perhaps not spoken about often enough: even when you have left deliberately and responsibly, there can still be moments when you look back and wonder whether you could have done something differently.  That question becomes especially difficult when you leave an institution, another leader takes over, and the institution later struggles or, in some cases, does not survive. You begin asking yourself whether you prepared it well enough, whether you missed something, whether leaving was the right decision, or whether you could have protected the institution better.

No matter how carefully we prepare people, strengthen systems and plan a transition, the person who takes over must eventually become accountable for what they do with the institution they inherit. Some institutions thrive after us, others struggle, and some may take directions we would never have chosen ourselves. What struck me about Arnold was how little he tried to control the story after he left. He understood that eventually responsibility had passed to someone else. You do the best you can while the institution is in your hands, but at some point you have to accept that it is no longer yours to direct.

When unfinished business hurts

I do not want faith in the next to become an excuse for treating unfinished business lightly. This final reflection is not about pretending that unfinished work does not matter. Leaders grapple with real things left undone. Some are painful, some have serious consequences and some continue to trouble us long after we have left. There is a danger in speaking about succession too neatly, as though a leader simply prepares the next person, hands over and walks away in peace. That is not always how it happens. Sometimes you leave with questions. Sometimes you know you could have done better. Sometimes you become aware, very late in your tenure, of a problem you wish you had seen much earlier. The challenge is not to deny those realities, but neither is it to use them as proof that you should remain indefinitely.

There are moments when unfinished business does not feel philosophical at all. It feels like failure.

I experienced this myself. When I joined ZimRights with the task of helping turn around the organisation, there were many things that required attention. One of the areas I believed we needed to change was our people culture. I was heavily influenced by John C. Maxwell’s High Road Leadership: Bringing People Together in a World That Divides. In that book, Maxwell argues that good leadership begins with valuing people and placing people above the leader’s own agenda. That reinforced something I had come to believe deeply: we cannot genuinely lead people if we do not care about them. Today, much of this is described in organisational language as safeguarding, but in simple terms safeguarding begins with care for people.

In many organisations I had encountered, people genuinely wanted to care for those around them, yet good intentions did not always translate into practices and systems that actually protected people. Abuse can come from fellow employees, managers, board members or any situation in which power is misused. During my time at ZimRights, I invested heavily in strengthening our internal culture and the systems that governed how we worked with and cared for one another. But I had a blind spot.

ZimRights is not simply an organisation with staff working inside an office. It is a large membership movement, with thousands of members interacting with the organisation in different ways and in different spaces. I had not fully appreciated that those interactions could themselves create safeguarding risks. In my final year, an incident forced me to confront that blind spot. I took it personally and I felt responsible. I looked at the work I had done to strengthen the organisation and found myself asking how this vulnerability had escaped my attention. Two more colleagues came forward and told me they felt I had not been paying enough attention. Had I failed to provide the protection that people under our care deserved? Could I have done more? Could I have seen it earlier? Those are not easy questions, and they do not disappear simply because one’s tenure is ending. I could not undo what had happened, but I also knew that discovering this problem did not mean I could stay indefinitely. What I could do was act on what we now knew.

Before I left, we began putting in place resources, commitments and processes to ensure that safeguarding would receive sustained attention under the incoming leadership. The aim was to make safeguarding part of how the organisation worked rather than something dependent on one leader’s presence. Was I completely satisfied? No. Even now, I can look back and tell myself that I could have done better. Perhaps every leader who reflects honestly has a few such regrets. But that is precisely why unfinished business deserves to be spoken about honestly. To acknowledge it is not to celebrate loose ends, excuse failure or pretend that everything will somehow sort itself out once we leave. Leaving involves real contradictions. There are moments when we know that something important remains unresolved and yet also know that our time has come to an end. The temptation is to deal with that tension through denial: either we deny that the problem exists so that we can leave comfortably, or we convince ourselves that because the problem exists, we cannot possibly leave. Neither response is enough.

The aim is not to deny that things remain unfinished. The aim is to prepare the next leaders to take responsibility for what remains. That means naming what is unresolved, documenting it properly, putting systems around it where necessary, and ensuring that those who follow understand what still needs attention. It also means accepting that they may respond differently from the way we would. They may correct what we got wrong, abandon things we thought were important, or begin work we never imagined. That is not necessarily a failure of leadership. It is what happens when an institution is no longer dependent on one person.

When unfinished business is success

There is another kind of unfinished business t

hat is spoken about far less. Leadership is serious work, and I remember telling a colleague that if we ever reach a point where we know we are no longer giving our best, that may be an indication that it is time to pass on the baton. That is the easier part to understand. The more difficult question is what to do when things are finally working. My final year at ZimRights was exciting. The wider context was difficult: funding freezes and shifting donor priorities were affecting many organisations. Yet after years of deliberate work, our own sustainability strategy was beginning to bear fruit. Partnerships and grants that had taken a long time to negotiate were starting to move us away from living hand to mouth. I remember one colleague saying, “We are beginning to get the hang of this thing.” And we were.

The progress was not only financial. Internally, we had built a strong leadership team. That year, 2025, we held our first strategic leadership team retreat in Cape Town, facilitated by people who helped us think deliberately about how we wanted to work together and develop ourselves as a team. I still remember the energy of that retreat: the conversations with Mark Heywood and Phil Zamchiya, the reconnection, and the sense that something important had come together. It reminded me of the biblical story of the transfiguration, when the disciples wanted to remain on the mountain because the moment felt so complete. That was close to how I felt. We had spent years trying to build the organisation, and suddenly there were signs that many of the pieces were coming together. If there was ever an argument for staying, this was it.

Yet this was also the year in which I sat with the leadership team and told them that I was stepping down and that it was now their turn. We had to work through the disappointment and the questions that followed. Why leave now, when we were finally getting the hang of it? Why leave when the sustainability strategy was beginning to work, the team was stronger, and the movement was gaining momentum? That experience reminded me that unfinished business does not always come from failure or regret. Sometimes the unfinished business is something good that has only just begun. The temptation to stay can be strongest when things are finally coming together. Some even said, “It’s your time to eat” – their way of saying that, after years of building, I should now stay and enjoy the fruits of the work.

But if we believe in the people we have prepared, in the systems we have strengthened and in the institution beyond ourselves, then even success can be part of the unfinished business that must eventually be handed over. Faith in the next is not only about trusting others with the problems we could not solve. It is also about trusting them with the things that are going well. I have always said that, when all is said and done, the leadership goal that truly matters is to leave the organisations we lead just a little better than we found them. Everything else is a bonus.

The vow of silence

Perhaps the art of letting go becomes real when it is practised as a ritual. If you have ever loved an institution, a movement or a calling with passion, then you know that leaving is never purely administrative. Earlier in Part 8 of this series, From Founder to Foundation, I wrote about the traps that come with transition and the many ways in which leaders can pretend to leave while still remaining at the centre. If we love the work and yet know that our time has come, we need a discipline that helps us navigate the temptation to remain involved in everything. The discipline I came to depend on is what I now call the vow of silence.

I was director number seven at ZimRights, and I knew that each of my predecessors had loved the organisation and had done their best for it. They played their part and then allowed the organisation to move on. As my own departure approached, there were people in the organisation and on the board who asked me not to go, while others suggested ways in which I might leave formally but remain involved in the business of the organisation. I understood the instinct, but I also knew that this could easily become another way of refusing to leave. So I devised a ritual. The first part was to build confidence in those who were going to take over. When the National Chairperson announced my resignation to the Management Committee and the obvious question came – who do you think should take over? – my answer was that the organisation should not be looking for another version of me. The same leadership team that had supported my tenure was already capable of continuing the work, with one of them stepping forward to provide leadership on behalf of that team.

This was important because whatever people thought I had done well was rarely the work of one person. The achievements associated with my tenure had been built around that table. The reports, campaigns, programmes, movement-building work and public moments for which I sometimes received credit were the work of colleagues who had developed the ideas, coordinated the projects and done much of the difficult work. I remember this clearly in September 2025, when we launched The Broken Calabash: 2025 State of Peace Report. At one point, I was not convinced that the report would see the light of day. One member of the team called me and said, in effect, “Go to Bulawayo and prepare to launch it. I will deal with the challenges here.” She did exactly that. I travelled to Bulawayo and launched the report with enormous pride, while the colleague whose determination had made that moment possible remained far from the spotlight. That moment captured what I was trying to explain to the board: much of what appeared publicly as my leadership was possible because other people were leading, often without being seen.

In most of my leadership moments, I had the privilege of being the public face of something collective. My argument to the board was therefore simple: the capacity to continue did not have to be imported from somewhere else. It was already present in the team. The task was not to find an individual who could become me; it was to allow a team that had already been leading to continue, while one of its members took on the formal responsibility of holding the title.

When the board made its decision, it appointed Gillian Chinzete as my successor. In doing so, ZimRights made history by appointing the first woman to lead the organisation in its 34-year history. That became the second part of the ritual: giving the organisation something to celebrate that was not about the person who was leaving. The story was no longer my departure. The story was that new leadership had arrived, and history had been made.

As I prepared to leave my office, the ritual became physical. In the ethical will I left Gillian on 29 December 2025, I named three “sacred objects” that I wanted to remain with her: the clock, the baton and the newspaper. The clock, which sat opposite the desk, was a reminder that a leader’s tenure is “a lease, not a deed.” The baton was engraved with the names of the directors who had come before her, my own name included, a reminder that none of us owns the institution; each of us receives it for a time and then passes it on. The newspaper was the copy of NewsDay of 20 November 2025 carrying the headline, “ZimRights appoints female director in 34yrs,” documenting the moment ZimRights appointed its first woman National Director. I also handed over the keys to the office, the vehicle and the safe, simple symbols that authority had genuinely changed hands. And I left the letter itself: an ethical will addressed to Gillian as “My Dear Successor.”

The opening section of the ethical will was titled “The Covenant of Release (The Vow of Silence).” I wrote, “My first gift to you is my absence.” I wanted to make clear that I would not hover over the institution or try to govern it through memory and commentary. Gillian owed no loyalty to my methods. If she needed to dismantle something I had built in order to secure ZimRights’ future, she had my blessing to do so. But the vow of silence was not a denial of unfinished business. In the next section, which I called “The Generational Mandates,” I named three pieces of work that I knew would outlive my tenure: the Zimbabwe Human Rights Village, the decriminalisation of poverty, and the multiplication of leaders. Naming them was important because letting go does not mean pretending there is nothing left to do. It means being honest about what remains, while accepting that the next leader must decide how to take it forward. That is what the vow came to mean for me: not saying nothing, but refusing to lead from outside the organisation and creating room for Gillian to become fully responsible, to make decisions, to make mistakes and to build a relationship with ZimRights that was her own. The ethical will ended with a simple transfer of responsibility: “The watch is yours.” In that sense, the vow of silence was my final act of faith in the next.

The final lesson

When I began writing this series, I thought I was writing about leaving. Along the way, I realised that I was really writing about leadership. Every instalment has asked the same question in a different way: how do we build institutions that outlive us, how do we prepare others to lead, how do we know when our time has come to an end, and once we leave, how do we resist the temptation to continue leading from outside? None of these questions has a perfect answer. Every transition is different, and every leader brings their own fears, hopes, doubts and regrets to the process. But I have become convinced that letting go is not separate from leadership. It is part of leadership. It requires us to believe that what we have built can matter beyond us, to accept that others will see things we did not see, and to give those who come after us enough room to lead in their own way.

There will always be unfinished business: another project, another conversation, another idea that never quite reaches completion, another problem we wish we had solved, and sometimes another success we wish we could stay to enjoy. That is not a reason to stay forever. It is simply part of leading an institution that is meant to continue beyond us. We do our part, we build, we prepare, we hand over, and when our time comes, we leave with enough confidence to believe that the story does not end with us. That is what I mean by faith in the next. And that, ultimately, is the art of letting go.