Constitution process in chaos
JAMA MAJOLA | 25 September, 2011 03:52
The constitution -making process in Zimbabwe is in disarray as thematic
committees capturing data in narrative forms were locked in heated arguments
this week on how to do it and what guidelines to use.
The situation throws President Robert Mugabe’s election plans further into
disarray.
Checks by the Sunday Times showed that 23 thematic committees of the
Constitutional Parliamentary Committee (Copac) assembled in Harare to write
narrative district reports and download information had been haggling over
the exercise, and so falling further behind their timetables.
“We have been fighting over so many issues, including how to write district
reports in narrative forms and what template to use,” a senior Copac member
said. “We have even been fighting over typists, after eight of the 23
seconded from parliament had dubious credentials. We suspect they were
intelligence agents deployed to manipulate the situation.
“It’s chaotic and frustrating. Each time we reconvene, we fight for days
before working.”
Another Copac member said there was still a long way to go before the
drafting stage.
After they had finished writing district narrative reports on top of the
qualitative and quantitative ones, members still had to move onto provincial
and national narrative reports.
This has raised doubts about the possibility of elections early next year,
the time Mugabe wants them, after failing to get his wish to hold polls this
year.
After finishing its reports, Copac will move onto the drafting stage, which
is more contentious. A new draft constitution will then emerge and be
submitted for a referendum.
But prior to that, it will be put out for public comment and taken to
parliament, where it would need a two-thirds majority to pass.
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC-T leader, says a referendum on the
new constitution is now only likely to be held in May or June next year,
past the time Mugabe wants elections to be held. But polls can only come
after a new constitution has been adopted.
Welshman Ncube, the Minister of Trade and Industry and leader of the MDC-N,
says polls can only realistically be held in 2013, which is bad news for
Mugabe, who is old and ailing.
The compilation of district and provincial reports by the thematic
committees through qualitative and quantitative methods was completed
recently. Sixty district reports were compiled from the reports of meetings
held in 1857 wards by the outreach teams. The reports, together with written
submissions to Copac and all website submissions, were then collated into 10
provincial reports.
Before drafting can commence, the provincial reports have to be consolidated
and distilled into a national report. But work on this has not yet started,
because Copac felt it was necessary for the consolidation of the outcomes of
the outreach process into the district and provincial reports to be checked
for errors and omissions, to ensure that what the people said had been
correctly captured. The thematic committees are still battling with the
narrative reports.
The constitution-making process has been a stop-start affair. The earlier
stages of the process – since 2009 up to the first all-stakeholders’
conference followed a set timetable, but after that the process stalled.
The outreach was scheduled to start by the end of July 2009, but did not do
so until late in June last year. It was supposed to take no more than four
months, but was not completed until March 15 this year. This meant the
thematic committee stage started a year and a half late, and its progress
too has been a stop-start one. The delays were due to poor logistics, poor
planning, lack of funding, political party disputes, accusations of
tampering with data and political harassment and the arrest of some Copac
members, including MDC-T co-chairman Douglas Mwonzora.
Disagreements about the methodology to be used stalled the start of
interpreting and downloading data, and the committees only eventually
assembled for a training workshop on May 3 and started work on the ward
reports on May 5.
More time was then lost through renewed disagreements.