PRIME Minister Morgan Tsvangirai risked putting himself on a collision course with his MDC party on Monday after admitting he now wanted a negotiated constitution between the three main political parties.
Tsvangirai said the ongoing public consultations on a new charter for Zimbabwe had descended into a political contest.
“Unfortunately what has happened is that all parties took a position that they are going to take a partisan view on what the constitution should ultimately look like and that has caused problems. It became not a process of allowing people to speak but a process of contestation between the parties,” Tsvangirai told a meeting organised by a local NGO in Harare.
He added: “The current constitutional making process will be affected by the fact that no party has a two thirds majority in parliament and because of that, no party will be in a position of imposing its will on constitutional principle.
“It will have to be ultimately a negotiated constitution, but the process of public participation was intended to ensure that no Zimbabwean across the political divide should be prevented from airing their views.”
Tsvangirai’s new stance brings him full circle to a position adopted by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF party before the start of the public consultations that a new constitution would have to be negotiated between the three main parties represented in Parliament, which would smooth the charter’s way through the House of Assembly and Senate.
Zanu PF wanted a constitutional draft agreed in September 2007 between its negotiators and those from the two rival MDC factions to form the basis of a new constitution – effectively making it a reference point for any public consultations.
The so-called ‘Kariba Draft’ constitution was crafted by lawyers – including Tendai Biti (MDC-T), Welshman Ncube (MDC-M) and Patrick Chinamasa (Zanu PF) -- from the three parties to the power sharing government in the picturesque town of Kariba.
The document was made available to the public for the first time as Annexure B to the power-sharing agreement of September 15, 2008, signed by the two MDC formations and Zanu PF (see the ‘Kariba Draft’ in full).
With public consultations in the Parliament-led outreach programme set to end in October, Tsvangirai now accepts that any document produced by Parliament’s appointed constitution drafters could suffer a still-birth.
Campaign groups have rejected a compromise document between the three main parties, calling it undemocratic.
The National Constitutional Assembly which has threatened to mobilise for a rejection of a draft to come out of the ongoing outreach programme said a constitution agreed “by a handful of political elites” without consulting the public is “an undemocratic usurpation of the right of Zimbabweans to write a constitution for themselves."