Bill Watch 47/2019
Supplementary Budget Acts gazetted & MOPO Bill delayed
22 August 2019
subsection (3) shall be liable to a fine not exceeding level 10 or to
imprisonment for a period not exceeding one year or to both”.
The MDC-A Chief Whip in the Senate, Senator Lilian Timveos, warned that the
Opposition considered the Bill to be so inconsistent with the Constitution that
challenges in the Constitutional Court were inevitable.
Eventually, the amended Bill was referred back to the PLC for a report on the
amendment’s consistency with the Constitution.
Finance (No. 2) Bill [link] & Appropriation Supplementary (2019) Bill [link]
These two Bills were approved by the Senate as passed by the National
Assembly, but not without protests and questions from Opposition Senators.
Protests centred on complaints that some Senators had not had been supplied
with copies of the Bills and had, therefore, been unable to study them.
Questioned about the new PAYE tax-free threshold of $700 per month, Minister
Ncube said the figure of $700 had been suggested to his Ministry during
consultations with all the important National Employment Councils and
accepted as fair, but, if it proved to be too low during the next few months,
could be raised in the next Budget. On whether new allocations of funds for
provincial and local government bodies were constitutionally compliant he said
they were, and pointed out he had ensured that the sum allocated to provinces
and local authorities achieved the constitutional minimum of 5% of national
revenues for the financial year, as fixed by section 301(3) of the
Constitution. But disbursement of funds allocated to provinces would depend
on the enactment of new legislation for Provincial Councils, who would
between them be getting one-quarter of that 5%. Minister Ziyambi added that
the constitutional provisions for devolution contained inconsistencies that
needed to be corrected; this would be dealt with in the Government’s proposed
omnibus Constitution Amendment Bill, which would also attend to “a lot” of
other things, such as the timing of delimitation of constituencies and other
areas for electoral purposes.
Acts gazetted On 16th August Parliament sent both these Bills to the
President and on 21st August both were gazetted as Acts, having received the
President’s assent – Finance (No. 2) Act, 2019 (No. 7 of 2019) [link] and
Appropriation Supplementary (2019) Act, 2019 (No. 8 of 2019) [link]. The
former Act’s re-enactment of the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures)
(Amendment of (Amendment of Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Act and Issue of
Real Time Gross Settlement Electronic Dollars (RTGS Dollars)) Regulations,
2019, Statutory Instrument 33/2019, became law only hours before the expiry
of the statutory instrument.
Coming Up in Parliament This Week
According to the Parliamentary Sitting Calendar, MPs should have been
enjoying a recess from 2nd August to 10th September, the day scheduled for
the opening of the Second Session. Instead, both Houses had to sit in the