| The best Zimbabwe news site on the world wide web |  |
Fresh constitutional amendments should face battle royal
By
Professor Jonathan Moyo, MP
IN THE sunset politics of uncertain leadership succession, such as embroiling
the increasingly isolated Robert Mugabe, it is almost axiomatic that
when an incompetent ruling party, such as Zanu PF, faces an
impotent official opposition party, such as the MDC, in a volatile
political environment underpinned by economic meltdown raising a lot
of choking dust all over the place, such as is currently happening in
Zimbabwe, the ruling party invariably tends to be defensive by adopting
a self-perpetuating Ostrich approach while embarking on futile policies
and burying its head in the sand in the hope that after the dust has
settled down the hapless opposition would have gone with the wind and
the futile policies would have become law.
This retrogressive approach by the Zanu PF government which has reduced Zimbabwe to a banana republic was dramatized yesterday when the Herald reported that Patrick Chinamasa has finally confirmed media reports that first surfaced in the Zimbabwe Independent last June that Robert Mugabe, who has failed to groom a successor over a period of 25 years owing to his love for unilateral power, now wants to abuse the Constitution of Zimbabwe to manage his succession in Zanu PF and the presidency of the country by avoiding presidential elections until 2010.
What Chinamasa confirmed without saying so in so many words is this. The jittery and clueless power mongers in Zanu PF believe that Robert Mugabe has so outlived his political usefulness that it is no longer possible for him to be succeeded by anyone from the beleaguered ruling party who can win a presidential election should the office of the president become vacant either through: (a) Mugabe’s sudden mental incapacitation, resignation or death or (b) completion of Mugabe’s term in March 2008.
The same power mongers are also fear that it is no longer possible for any Zanu PF presidential candidate, including Robert Mugabe, to win any presidential election held on its own without legislative elections in which parliamentary candidates on a Zanu PF ticket would reinforce and support the ruling party’s presidential candidate as a matter of self interest.
As a result, the Zanu PF power mongers believe that they can have a Machiavellian way out by taking subversive advantage of the ruling party’s technical two thirds majority in Parliament to abuse the Constitution of Zimbabwe as an instrument for delaying presidential elections until 2010. In other words, Zanu PF wants to remain at State House beyond the expiry of Mugabe’s current term in March 2008 without facing any popular presidential election until 2010.
The Machiavellian pretext invoked by the Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, Patrick Chinamasa, who seems recklessly determined to distance himself from allegations that he was a key participant of the so-called Dinyane coup plot in Tsholotsho last November by appeasing his scheming accusers, is to fatuously claim that there is a need to harmonize presidential and parliamentary elections. Yet if there is such a need, then it has not been demonstrated by anyone worth taking seriously and if the need has been demonstrated, maybe at some obscure seminar or irrelevant meeting of the Zanu PF politburo, then that need is most definitely not urgent and is therefore not a national priority given the spiraling political and economic crisis facing Zimbabwe today.
Chinamasa was quoted by the Herald as saying that “whether the President [Mugabe] retires or not, the question, of course, still remains that his term of office expires in 2008 and, in this connection, Chinamasa alleged that “there was already debate over how that would impact on plans to make legislative and presidential elections coterminous”. If this debate is indeed taking place in Zanu PF, then it’s yet another proof that the dead wood and political cowards and stooges in the ruling party have nothing useful for the country to debate.
This is because such a debate is totally useless in a country where there’s three-digit-inflation that is escalating, where over 80% of the population lives below the poverty datum line, where unemployment is over 75% of the workforce, where basic commodities and food stuffs are either unavailable or unaffordable and where 18% of the population has been rendered destitute through the destruction of its homes or livelihood or both under an evil so called Operation Murambatsvina undertaken by an incompetent government whose party is busy debating the harmonization of presidential and parliamentary elections as an urgent constitutional priority.
Four diversionary scenarios under which the proposed harmonization would be done were advanced by Chinamasa.
The first scenario is that the term of the current parliament which expires in 2010 could be cut short so as to have presidential and parliamentary elections in 2008. Curiously, if the proposal to harmonize presidential and parliamentary elections was genuine and being introduced by Zanu PF without prejudice related to the party’s desire to abuse the Constitution of Zimbabwe to deal with its internal succession squabbles, then this would clearly be the route to follow. Parliament can be dissolved at any time in terms of the Constitution and there is no need for a constitutional amendment for that.
Yet Chinamasa’s emphasis was clearly on the need for a constitutional amendment and that should indicate that there is more to the issue than mere harmonization of presidential and parliamentary elections. Of course, technically, the argument is that while the Constitution does empower the President to dissolve Parliament at any time, a constitutional amendment would be necessary in order to reduce the term of office for the President from six years to five years but this point is really pedantic.
The clearest argument that Zanu PF has no intention to have the harmonization begin in 2008 with presidential and parliamentary elections was made by Chinamasa to the Zanu PF central committee in a Memorandum dated may 27, 2005.
In that Memorandum Chinamasa defended the reintroduction of the Senate, which has since become part of the Constitution through Constitutional Amendment Act, Number 17, in the following terms:
“The proposal to introduce the Senate at this hour, at this juncture, should correctly be regarded as a stop gap measure for the period 2005 to 2010. The structure and composition of the Senate will again be reconsidered in a more holistic manner within the context of the more comprehensive Constitutional proposals that I shall propose later in the life of this [Sixth Parliament]”
| "The claim that Mugabe has encouraged his party to discuss the issue of his succession openly is pure fiction, actually it is nonsense. Just ask those like this writer" |
| JONATHAN MOYO |
To avoid any doubt as to what he could have been talking about on the proposal to reintroduce the Senate, Chinamasa further made the following telling statement to the Zanu PF central committee meeting last May:
“Central Committee is being asked to approve this proposal as the best workable proposition in the circumstances for the period between 2005 and 2010”.
It is very clear from the above statement by Chinamasa, which was approved by the Zanu PF central committee last May, that—through logical extrapolation—the bench year for the intended harmonization sought by Chinamasa is 2010 and not 2008. Therefore the first scenario given by Chinamasa as reported by the Herald yesterday is pure mumbo jumbo that should be dismissed with the contempt it deserves.
The second scenario that Chinamasa painted is to have an election for the President in 2008 only to serve for two years up to 2010. As it turns out, and based on reliable information from Zanu PF sources—including Chinamasa himself—this is in fact the scenario that Zanu PF wants to bring via the proposed 18th amendment to the Constitution of Zimbabwe.
According to this second scenario, presidential and parliamentary elections would be harmonized in March 2010 under a possible but not certain new constitution which could take effect from 2010. Such a new constitution is possible in that that’s what Zanu PF is promising to the MDC faction that the ruling party is talking to and to other liberal minded sections of the ruling party but the promise is not certain in that Chinamasa’s Machiavellian approach is designed to ensure that the key amendments that Zanu PF needs are made well in advance of and outside a comprehensive constitutional reform process.
Once Zanu PF gets the amendments it needs through the ongoing piecemeal approach to amending the Constitution, it will have no reason to or interest in a comprehensive constitutional reform ahead of or even after the harmonized presidential and parliamentary elections in March 2010.
But what is critical to observe about the second scenario of having an election of a President in 2008 to serve only for two years is that Chinamasa did not tell the Herald how that President would be elected in 2008 or who would elect that President to serve for only two years until 2010. Again, it turns out that the kind of election Chinamasa is talking about would not be a popular election by the people of Zimbabwe but would be an election of a President for two years by the Parliament of Zimbabwe in which Zanu PF has a two thirds technical majority that would be expected, actually required, to deliver the vote regardless of the merits.
The precedence for this was in December 1987, after the signing of the controversial and practically useless Unity Accord between PF Zapu and Zanu PF, when Parliament elected Mugabe as the first Executive President of the republic of Zimbabwe to serve what also amounted to a two year period until March 1990 when Mugabe faced the popular ballot. This is exactly the plan that Zanu PF has and it is so sinister that it stinks all the way to hell and would have to be fully resisted by any democratic and constitutional means available including an uprising of the masses.
This is because, as already pointed, Zanu PF does not believe that it can produce a presidential candidate to succeed Mugabe who can win a popular presidential election before 2010. The election of a President by Parliament in 2008 to serve for only two years would give the chosen Zanu PF successor some time to learn the ropes of patronage so as to be able to be presidential by dishing out slush funds ahead of the elections in 2010.
An interesting twist to this second scenario, again which is the scenario that Zanu PF wants, is that the proposed 18th amendment would also repeal the current provision in the Constitution that requires the holding of presidential elections within 90 days of the mental incapacitation, resignation or death of an incumbent. A proposed new constitutional provision would require that a designated vice president serves the remainder of the term if the incumbent resigns, is mentally incapacitated or dies.
Apparently, in addition to a palpable fear that he might die in office, the plan seems to be designed to give Mugabe an opportunity to resign before 2008 and to enable his successor to get between 12 to 24 months before March 2008 when that successor would be given another 24 months through an election as a transitional president until 2010. Whereas the façade now is that the transition would be from the current Constitution to a new one to take effect in 2010, the intended political reality is that the transition would be from the current holding of separate presidential and parliamentary elections to the proposed harmonization of these elections that will take effect in March 2010.
A third scenario presented by Chinamasa is to have a popular election of the President in 2008 to serve for seven years until 2015 and for the proposed harmonization to start in 2015. This is a stupid scenario and the fact that Chinamasa mentioned it shows more the contempt he has for Zimbabweans whose intelligence he was insulting than anything else. Chinamasa knows as well as any average fool that the Zanu PF power mongers who want an 18th amendment to the Constitution of Zimbabwe now will all be dead, buried and forgotten by 2015 and so there is no need to bother ourselves analyzing such a silly scenario.
The fourth scenario, which the Herald sought to dismiss, is that Mugabe could be the President elected by Parliament in 2008 to extend his term to 2010. Although this scenario was dismissed by the Herald story on grounds that Mugabe “has told his party to openly discuss the issue of his succession” and that he has made repeated announcements of his intention to step down at the end of his term in 2008, the fact is that this scenario competes with the second scenario and is therefore real.
It is very possible that, if he keeps on breathing and lives to rule another day until March 2008, Mugabe could use the proposed amendment described under the second scenario to turn around and claim that he is still as fit as a fiddle and that he could do two more years to save Zanu PF and Zimbabwe from total collapse because by then infighting within the ruling party is certain to reach fever point and the country would be in the doldrums.
The claim that Mugabe has encouraged his party to discuss the issue of his succession openly is pure fiction, actually it is nonsense. Just ask those like this writer associated with the so-called Tsholotsho Declaration. The existence of the second and fourth scenarios is clearly intended to leave Mugabe with an open option of remaining at State House until 2010. The essence of the second and fourth scenarios is that Zanu PF is afraid of facing the electorate in presidential elections before 2010. Even Mugabe is now afraid of the voters and would want to have his term extended from 2008 to 2010 by political cowards and stooges of his party.
Eve so, it is important to repeat and emphasize that the desired option is the second one for the reasons already stated.
Against the backdrop
of the foregoing, Zimbabweans at home and in the Diaspora should start
now to resist the proposed 18th amendment. Zimbabwe must have presidential
elections preferably now and certainly within the next 29 months if
the country can manage to go that far. Because it is now quite clear
that Zanu PF is determined to use its technical two thirds in Parliament,
to subvert the democratic process by postponing presidential elections
until 2010, the people must now use their three thirds majority outside
Parliament to stop Zanu PF madness by any means necessary. The time
for that kind of action has come and it is now.
Professor Jonathan Moyo is MP for Tsholotsho constituency and a
former government spokesman
JOIN
THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
newsdesk@newzimbabwe.com
All material copyright newzimbabwe.com
Material may be published or reproduced in any form with appropriate credit to this website