• by Vusumuzi Sifile (harare)
• Monday, January 11, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Months of delays may prove to have strengthened the process of producing a new constitution for Zimbabwe. When a 65-day public consultation finally begins, citizens will be primed and ready.

'We will not make the blunder we made in 2000, of being told to just vote yes or no without any details of what that entailed,' says Jacqueline Manyonga, who sells plastic carrier bags at the Mbare Musika vegetable market in Harare.

'This time I want to go into those meetings and share my ideas on what ought to be done. I have already come up with my own ideas regarding terms of office for the president, and the recognition of (the informal sector's) contribution to economic growth.'

Elsewhere in Harare's Mbare market, Shadrack Dube also has a view on the drafting and amendment of the constitution.

'If you look at the current constitution and the other drafts that have been proposed, they are more biased towards the politicians than us, the ordinary citizens,' says Dube.

'If you look at all the things that are being said about the Kariba draft for example, it is all about terms of office for politicians, and nothing for the ordinary person. We also need our space in the running of affairs in this country.'

Redistribution of land, limits to executive powers, devolution of power to regions; Kariba draft, NCA draft, Constitutional Commission draft: civil society organisations have been running awareness campaigns across the country for months, helping Zimbabweans from all walks of life gain an understanding of the terms of the debate.

'People are eagerly awaiting the outreach teams,' said Okay Machisa, director of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association.

'In the meetings we have held, people expressed various views on what they would like to see in the new constitution and we will soon be launching a report on these. Most people suggested that an individual should be allowed two presidential terms of five years each.'

The chairperson of the Matabeleland Constitutional Reform Agenda, Effie Ncube, said his organisation had held hundreds of meetings in Matabeleland North and South, Bulawayo and the Midlands provinces.

'In the places we have been to, people want the constitution to be clear on such issues as devolution of power, as is the case in some African and European countries,' said Ncube.

It was civil society that established the National Constitutional Assembly in 1997, during growing protests and strikes against the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) led by Robert Mugabe. Its purpose was to increase popular awareness of and participation in constitution-making.

Within two years, Mugabe's government had begun a constitutional reform exercise in response to this pressure. A Constitutional Commission was established which produced a draft that was put to a vote in a February 2000 referendum.

Among other things, this draft proposed the acquisition of land from white commercial farmers, with the British government compensating the farmers. If the British government refused to pay to buy land for redistribution, there was a provision for the government to proceed to expropriate land without compensation.

The NCA campaigned for the rejection of the Constitutional Commission's draft, putting forward an alternative constitution which among other things proposed to limits executive powers.

'I voted no, simply because I was convinced this was a better option than to vote yes, which was being funded by the ZANU-PF government. And we had been told yes simply meant the government should go ahead and repossess all commercial farms and send us back to our homes,' says Dube, a former commercial farm worker.

The government draft was duly rejected, but veterans of Zimbabwe's war of liberation, closely aligned to ZANU-PF went ahead and violently seized many farms from white commercial farmers. The farm where Dube worked was taken in 2002, and he says he was left with no option but to head to Harare, where he started a new life as a vendor.

'I failed to understand when people started blaming that no vote for the constitutional problems that we later faced in the country. They said things would have been better if people had voted for the government-sponsored draft. This time I will only support a constitution that I know will also contain and respect my own views.'

The drafts in circulation in 2000 were both written by a few individuals, and members of the public only got involved when they were asked to vote for or against the government's version.

This year things are meant to be different. The Constitution Parliamentary Committee (COPAC) intends to use talking points extracted from various existing drafts. These, says co-chairperson of the committee Douglas Mwonzora, will guide citizens in making constructive input into the process.

'Our outreach programme is not going to be based on a draft document. We are going to use talking points,' he says.

Thematic committees will present questions to members of the public, and their answers will be gathered into the talking points, which will then be debated.

Individuals in thousands of meetings across the country will be able to draw their suggestions from any document they choose - including the Constitutional Commission draft rejected in 2000, the alternative draft put forward at that time by the NCA, or the Kariba draft drawn up by the negotiating teams that produced the Global Political Agreement that brought a bitter post-election struggle to a close in September 2008.

There have been concerns that some outlying areas would be left out because of difficulty in reaching them.

But the other co-chairperson of COPAC, Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana of ZANU-PF said they had put in place measures to reach every corner of Zimbabwe.

'If any area is not accessible we will provide time for it,' said Mangwana.

'That is why we said our period is plus or minus 65 days. We will make sure that no single ward in Zimbabwe will not be accessible. If it means hiring helicopters we will do so. We have employed mechanisms and video recorders for back up.'

Parliamentarians and civil society members attended preperatory sessions on Jan. 5 and 11, briefing them on their roles during this nation-wide outreach programme expected to last just over two months.

Progress in drafting a new constitution is seen as a positive sign of implementation of t

The Global Political Agreement signed in 2008 ended violent confrontation and created a government of national unity, but the Agreement's implementation has been marred by a series of high-profile disputes over key appointments, reform of the security services and the revision of legislation.

Progress in drafting a new constitution could be seen as a positive sign that the governing parties are all committed to respecting their 2008 commitments, as well as giving Zimbabwe's people the opportunity to decide how they themselves wish to be governed.

'This is the time we have been waiting for, and I cannot allow this opportunity to skip me,' says Manyonga at her stall in Mbare Musika.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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