Judgment No. CCZ 11/15 8 Const. Application No. CCZ 28/11 within the ambit of a political statement, I am of the view that the same cannot be said of the part that denigrated the judiciary and the High Court. I do not doubt that it transcended the ‘political’ arena and became a direct attack on the judiciary. I therefore have difficulty in accepting the applicant’s averment that such a statement ‘bordered on the incidental’ and could therefore not have been serious. I am in this respect persuaded to the merit in the following submission contained in the respondent’s heads of argument; “The applicant’s words about the judiciary not only impute improper and corrupt motives or conduct on those taking part in the administration of justice, but also excites misgivings as to the integrity, propriety and impartiality brought to the exercise of judicial office and such words indeed created a real or substantial risk of impairing public confidence in the administration of justice. The submission is also made that the crime committed in terms of s 182(1) of the Code falls in the category known as ‘Crimes Against the Administration of Justice’. The contempt charged was the type ordinarily referred to as ‘scandalising the court”. Such crime is described in In re Chinamasa 2000 - (2) ZLR 322, as one that is: ‘committed by publication either in writing or verbally of words calculated to bring a court, a judge or the administration of justice through the courts generally, into contempt’” As already indicated, the applicant also sought to defend his utterances against the judiciary on the basis that they constituted ‘comment’ on the debate focussed on the ‘proper role’ of the judiciary. I do not find this rather ingenious submission to be persuasive. I have already commented that the applicant’s bone of contention was the perceived collusion between ZANU(PF) and ZEC to further the former’s ‘agenda’ of seizing some parliamentary seats from the opposition. This grievance was, evidently, what motivated his denigrating comments on the judiciary. There is nothing in the statement to suggest that it was motivated by, or aimed at contributing to, some unspecified past, current or future debate on the ‘proper’ role of the judiciary.