I n s t i t u t e fo r j us t i ce a n d r eco n ci l iat i o n a fr i c a pr o g r a m m e The constitution neutralised the visions that the country’s liberation movements had for the post-independent state (Mandaza 1986). It guaranteed the white minority 20 seats in parliament, and entrenched land and property rights for 10 years, thereby preventing any immediate attempts at land reform. The Westminster-style constitution provided for a non-executive president, with a prime minister as head of government, a bicameral legislature, an independent judiciary, and an entrenched and justiciable Declaration of Rights. In the past 30 years, the constitution, which essentially represents a symbol of British colonialism, has been amended 19 times, but in a largely piecemeal manner and without any comprehensive national constitutional-reform strategy (ZLHR 2011). Although some of the amendments have addressed the entrenched and compromised provisions of the Lancaster House Constitution, most were engineered by the erstwhile ruling ZANU-PF to enable it to further centralise its power and galvanise executive authority (Hatchard 1991: 79–83; ZLHR 2011: 1–2). In particular, Constitutional Amendment No. 7 of 1987 replaced the system of a ceremonial president and executive prime minister with the executive presidency that exists today. The executive powers of the presidency were entrenched by this and subsequent related amendments. Essentially, these presidential powers made the country’s judiciary and legislature unequal partners of the executive branch of government (Ncube 1991: 171). Thus the president has the ability to significantly influence the legislative branch of the state through: the power to make appointments to the senate; dissolve parliament should it pass a vote of no confidence in him or her;2 and to revoke an individual’s seat in parliament if the parliamentarian concerned ceases to be a member of the political party on whose ticket he/she was elected. The judicial branch is similarly subject to executive control: the president controls the appointment and removal of judges, commissioners, chiefs of the security services and other public figures, and can therefore unilaterally reconstitute various state bodies in pursuit of personal or partisan ends. A case in point was President Mugabe’s unilateral decision to extend the terms of office of the heads of five national security services by two years in February 2012 without consulting his fellow principals in the GPA (Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara).3 The general consensus, particularly since the 1990s, has been that the Lancaster House Constitution is deficient in many respects ‘because of its compromised, undemocratic origins and because of the governmental imbalance that had resulted from frequent amendments’ (ZLHR, 2011: 2). As a reaction to this, in 1997, a consortium of civic organisations that included churches, human-rights groups, political parties (although crucially not including ZANU-PF), trade unions, women’s organisations, youth groups and student movements established the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) to lobby for a new home-grown constitution for Zimbabwe that would be democratic in its creation and its content. The NCA’s constitution-making efforts were largely driven by concerns about the authority of the president which appeared to have no boundary. Sithole (1999) noted that the NCA’s creation was more a reaction to the executive presidency created by the constitutional amendments since 1987 than to the Lancaster House Constitution. Recognising the popularity of the NCA’s constitutional-reform lobby, the ZANU-PF government then attempted to hijack the debate by establishing the Constitutional Commission in April 1999 to consider issues related to constitutional reform. The Constitutional Commission’s draft constitution The constitutional reform process initiated by government, and conducted under the auspices of the Constitutional Commission from 1999 to 2000, was inherently flawed in that it was specifically designed to ensure presidential control. In response to the NCA-led 2