ZCTU to campaign for rejection of new constitution

ZCTU to campaign for rejection of new constitution

NO VOTE: Lovemore Matombo

• Madhuku, Tsvangirai meeting fails to heal rift

• Sikhumbuzo Dube: Madhuku cannot impede reforms

• NCA vows to oppose constitutional reforms

• Zimbabwe announces committee for new constitution

• Jonathan Moyo: While Zanu PF has legitimacy but lacks credibility, NCA lacks both

By Lebo Nkatazo
Posted to the web: 29/04/2009 14:27:01
THE Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) says it will oppose constitutional reforms led by parliament.

Leaders of the umbrella body for Zimbabwe’s trade unions met Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai last week to express disquiet at the process to draw up a new constitution for Zimbabwe.

“We said ‘why do you want to do the wrong things instead of the right things?’ We cannot have a wrong formula for the right answer. We will campaign for a ‘no vote’ against that bloody constitution,” ZCTU president Lovemore Matombo told a press conference on Tuesday.

Tsvangirai, a former secretary general of the ZCTU, has been assailed by his comrades in civil society since becoming Prime Minister in a power sharing government with President Robert Mugabe in February.

His critics say he has abandoned a principled stand he took as opposition leader to demand a “people-driven” constitutional reform, and was now backing a process to be led by a 25-member parliamentary committee.

Last week, the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), a lobby group Tsvangirai once chaired, also gave notice that it would campaign for a rejection of a constitutional draft that emerges from the parliament-led process.

NCA chairman Lovemore Madhuku met Tsvangirai and senior government officials before emerging to tell reporters: “We agreed to disagree.”

Professor Jonathan Moyo, an independent legislator who was a member of the 1999 Constitutional Commission whose draft was rejected at a referendum said: “When Tsvangirai’s MDC was not in power in 1999, it opposed the use of parliament to make a new constitution in the hope its opposition would get it into power.

“But now that it is in government, the MDC-T is supporting the very same parliamentary process it vehemently opposed in 1999 hoping that it can use parliament, which it believes it controls, to outfox everyone else and remain in power to rule alone under an undemocratic constitution.”

Moyo said “parliament, whether now or in future, is not the right institution to spearhead the making of a new constitution. To be sure, there’s no doubt that parliament does indeed represent the will of the people, but only in the limited sense of a five-year term and within the confines of the constitution under which it is elected.”

He added: “No Member of Parliament is elected for life or forever. Parliament can within its term make laws and this really does not scare or concern anyone in a democracy because the same laws can be unmade by the next parliament if the people find the laws offensive or unworkable.

“Whereas laws are subject to change within and between parliamentary terms, the pillars of a democratic constitution, once made, are supposed to be forever and therefore permanent, and not subject to the whims and caprices of parliaments that are the products of political winds and their occasional prejudices.”
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