Harare - The first major meeting of all key participants in
Zimbabwe's nascent process to draft a new constitution, due to begin
on Friday, has been delayed after demands from President Robert
Mugabe's ZANU(PF) party, the head of the draft organizing committee
said Thursday.
'ZANU(PF) wanted us to postpone it indefinitely,' Douglas
Mwonzora, head of the parliamentary select committee to produce the
draft, said after a meeting with MPs. 'I don't understand the
strategic importance of a delay. We tried to make sense of it.'
After being rejected, the ZANU(PF) deputies then tried to have it
put back to the end of July, but Mwonzora said his committee allowed
it to be postponed only until Monday next week.
Monday is the deadline for the first all-stakeholders meeting set
down in terms of the transitional coalition agreement signed by
Mugabe and pro-democracy opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai - now
prime minister - in September last year to draft a new constitution.
'The problem with this is that it can't be postponed outside the
process prescribed by the global political agreement,' Mwonzora
said, referring to the document that committed Mugabe and Tsvangirai
to share power after a decade of brutal repression under the
85-year-old president. 'A postponement would be tantamount to an
amending the agreement, and then you are assured of a chain reaction
of amendments.'
The all-stakeholders meeting is due to bring together people from
political parties and civic groups to set up committees that will
process the demands of Zimbabweans voiced in a massive four-month
outreach programme across the country, and use this to draft the new
law.
Political analysts say that Mugabe is deeply anxious over the
proposed new constitution as he faces a strong possibility of being
voted out of power under a democratic constitution that would
stipulate free and fair elections under the rule of law and an
independent election authority monitored by international observers.
Every election since 2000 has been marred by extreme violence
against supporters of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change,
manipulation of the voting process by Mugabe's officials and vote
rigging. In June last year observers from the African Union, the
Southern African Development Community and the Pan-African Parliament
all dismissed the presidential run-off election as a violent fraud.
Mugabe is demanding that the constitutional drafting process
consider only a document known as the Kariba draft, which was
produced in 2007 by his justice minister and a former top official
from the MDC meeting in the northern town of Kariba, which had no
input from the public. Constitutional lawyers point out that if the
Kariba was adopted, and Mugabe won a presidential election, he would
be assured of another 10 years in office. He is now in his 30th year
of rule, and the word's oldest head of state.
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