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

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