organisations. This appears to be the case in Zimbabwe. Political parties can be freely formed but are not free to operate. There are gradations of regulatory frameworks ranging form the permissive to the most rigorous. In other words, party regulations can be defined and understood in two senses: liberally and expansively. The expansive sense of party regulation is when virtually all activities of political parties are regulated in one way or another from birth and throughout their lifespan. The liberal or ‘light’ sense is when only a few aspects of political party activities are subject to official intervention and control otherwise the parties enjoy considerable autonomy and space to operate as they deem fit, of course within the confines of the law of the land. In this ‘light’ sense, political parties need not formalise their existence by registering their birth with any state regulatory agency. In a multi-party, electorally competitive system, it is indeed inevitable that political parties, as gladiators for power, do register their presence on the electoral field should they decide to contest elections. This suggests that registration of the parties for purposes of participating in the struggle for power via the modality of elections is unavoidable and compelling. This is because the parties have to appear on the ballot paper with other rival parties and so as to enable voters to make a ballot box choice between or among them. This is the ‘soft’ end of the registration continuum. Often, the supreme law of the country, i.e. the Constitution, is silent on the existence and rights of political parties. The German Constitution prior to unification ignored political parties, which prominent patriots tended to view with distaste2. However, its Basic Law institutionalised them as essential instruments of democracy and, recognising the enormous influence of political parties, even goes to the extent of requiring that their internal organisation “conform to democratic principles.” 3 This appears excessively intrusive until the German case is viewed in the context of its troubled history. It has been persuasively argued that the principle that political parties may be formed freely allows the formation of parties that propagate the destruction of the state or the very democratic system itself that allowed their birth in the first place. To this extent, in Germany political parties may be proscribed or prohibited by the Federal Constitutional Court if their goals, objectives or activities of their supporters are directly against the democratic basis of the state and its existence4. Moreover, there is no universal consensus on the need for so regulating. There are plausible arguments for and against regulating political parties. Some of the arguments for requiring registration of political parties are selfserving and are usually advanced by incumbent regimes and in such circumstances, party regulations are not necessarily in pursuit of the public interest. Often, the regulation of political parties is done for purposes of monitoring, controlling and upstaging opposition or non-governing political parties. In short, such registration is done so as to create an unfair political playing field and therefore is not done in good faith. This is the case not only with most post-Independence partial or pseudo-democracies but was also the standard legal staple under apartheid in South Africa and in settler colonialism in Rhodesia. In apartheid South Africa and colonial Rhodesia, numerous political parties and organisations were routinely banned in terms of security legislation and ‘security’ was broadly defined to capture within its definitional ambit many otherwise innocuous organisations. When done in good faith, party regulation is meant to promote transparency and democratic accountability to the public, curb corrupt practices and provide for penalties for breach of the regulations. Many countries have regulations governing political party at some stage of the political game. These include mature democracies in North America like Canada and the United States, many European countries including Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Austria, Spain and African countries like South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique and 2 David Currrie, “The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany” (1994, 207) Ibid. 4 Rautenbach and Malhembe, Constitutional Law, 3rd ed., 1999, 135. Since the commencement of the German Constitution, only two parties had been banned by 1999. 3 8