Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum CHAPTER TWO THE DRAFT CONSTITUTION The Politics of Constitutional Reform The Constitutional Review Commission, later known as the Constitutional Commission (CC), was gazetted on 28 April 1999, after government ministers unsuccessfully tried to dictate to the civil organisation called the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) the terms on which it might participate. Zanu-PF tried to reconstruct history by claiming to have initiated the process. MPsvii stressed that a government review of the Lancaster House Constitution was initially demanded by the Mutare Zanu-PF congress on 6 December 1997, but this was actually six months after the NCA had been formed to press for constitutional reform. At Zanu-PF’s 1998 congress, the central committee asked the president to appoint a review commission. MPs complained about his delay in responding to grassroots’ demands. Chaired by Justice Chidyausiku, the CC had 384 members. It included all constituency-elected and presidentially-appointed MPs except Margaret Dongo (Independent), who refused to sit on it; the 10 chiefs appointed to Parliament; all provincial governors and provincial chairmen of Zanu-PF plus its entire central committee; and all municipal mayors (all of whom were members of Zanu-PF). Threequarters of the 241 non-parliamentary members of the CRC were known affiliates of Zanu-PF.viii The remainder were mainly independent academics and business people. Only 51 (13%) of the commissioners were women. The CC sought the people’s views in its outreach programme. Much of the feedback publicly reported was extremely critical, of the CC itself as well as the presidential term of office and other executive issues in the existing constitutional arrangements. What Zimbabweans wanted bore a considerable resemblance to what they had inherited from the colonial state. Their wants centred on a stable, law-abiding, democratic polity and contradicted what the ruling party, Zanu-PF, regarded as ‘progressive’ political development. Feedback suggested that the current State President should be indicted for genocide in Matabeleland in the mid-1980s.ix Among the more interesting popular demands were for a female deputy president; authority for the Ombudsman’s Office to investigate corruption at all levels up to and including the presidency; severe (up to capital) punishment for proven corruption; castration or capital punishment for child rapists; and - from the judiciary - that all judges should be appointed strictly on merit and not on the basis of political preference, by the Judicial Service Commission (JSC).x The draft constitution (s.159, s.169), in contrast, made all judges plus all members of the JSC presidential appointees, the former with JSC and the latter with Senate approval. The submissions of the Registrar-General’s Office, condemned even by Zanu-PF MPs as incapable of running credible elections, were against an independent electoral commission. There were numerous reports of dispute within the CC. Issues which caused the most dispute were the ‘vetting’ of incoming information and its use in the drafting process, the content of the final draft, and the process by which it was approved at the final plenary session. The then AttorneyGeneral, Patrick Chinamasa, chairing the drafting committee, caused a major row by asserting, against the evidence, that ‘the consensus is for an executive president’.xi The CC chairman, Justice Chidyausiku, caused an even bigger rumpus by bulldozing the final draft through the final plenary session ‘by acclamation’, despite vocal public dissent by two dozen commissioners. This action contradicted the CC procedures which specified a secret ballot. It was the subject of a later legal challenge, as one commissioner predicted at the time might happen. 10