Member of Parliament for Tsholotsho North, Jonathan Moyo seems to be fronting the first faction as betrayed by his spirited attack on the process and the parliamentary committee spearheading it. The Zanu PF position on the new constitution has been mudded by Moyo’s utterances, spawning panic and despondency among the common people.
But people have drawn solace from President Robert Mugabe’s speeches at the Independence Day celebrations and only two days ago at the National Heroes’ Acre as he addressed mourners at the burial of Edson Ncube.
Mugabe said: “We are looking forward to an election on the basis of a new constitution.” That is the Zanu PF position and any utterances to the contrary are just self-serving nonsense.
Mugabe’s position is also the position of the other two principals in the government of national unity (GNU) born out of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) signed by the three parties on September 15 2008. Article VI of the GPA testifies to this.
In Article II (Declaration of Commitment) the three leaders of the signatory parties declared their commitment to the GPA and vowed, “The Parties hereby declare and agree to work together to create a genuine, viable, permanent, sustainable and nationally acceptable solution to the Zimbabwe situation and in particular to implement the following agreement (GPA) with the aims of resolving once and for all the current political and economic situations and charting a new political direction for the country.”
The Parliamentary Select Committee, generally referred to as Copac, is a child of the GPA. Article 6.1 says: “The parties hereby agree that they shall set up a Select Committee of Parliament composed of representatives of the parties” and spells out their terms of reference.
Moyo’s desperate attempt to discredit the process does not make any sense and the reasons he cites in doing so are patently fallacious. For example, in one of his abusive writings in the public press he avers that 80% of the people do not want a new constitution.
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He wrote recently in The Herald: “While the question of whether Zimbabwe needs a new constitution has not been factually established by Copac after its fatal failure to publish the national report with the views of the people, independent assessments of those views have indicated beyond disputation that at least 80% of them support the current constitution.”
I am sure if any of his political science students had written this in an essay Professor Jonathan Moyo would have taken him or her to task for writing such an earth-shattering statement without a shred of evidence.
How does he come by the figure 80%? Who did the “independent assessments”? This is a good example of poor scholarship. We all know that one of the pillars of the GPA is a people-driven constitution and his own political party, in which he sits in the highest decision-making body outside congress, the Soviet-style politburo, undertook to work with the other parties to write a new constitution. We also know that the same political party bussed people to outreach meetings where their views superseded those of the other political parties. Some Zanu PF members even boasted they had, like in a soccer match, outplayed their opponents from the two MDCs.
Moyo now calls the people seconded by his own party and the other parties to spearhead the constitution-writing process the “Copac Mafia” and labels the draft they have produced a “regime-change” pamphlet. He accuses Copac’s draft of being targeted at Mugabe and other individuals in Zanu PF. He says the new constitution, if adopted, will take considerable power from the President to various committees which would be easy to manipulate.
In saying this Moyo is purporting to be fighting in Mugabe’s corner when we all know that the new constitution is for posterity and not for the next election in which Mugabe will be a candidate. It would be too short-sighted of anyone to write an anti-Mugabe constitution when we know for sure that even if he wins the coming election the ensuing term would definitely be his last because of his advanced age.
Moyo argues that the Copac draft is not people-driven but is a document driven by the UNDP through its plant “Hassen Ebrahim whose purpose has been to drive out and sabotage the people’s views from the making of their own constitution.”
Interestingly the same Hassen Ebrahim was part of the Constitution Commission in 1999 and worked with Moyo to write the constitution that was rejected in the February 2000 referendum. Then he was not a problem because he was his colleague!
Moyo makes another wild allegation which is not backed by substance at all. He writes: “While the real and full story of the UNDP’s dirty involvement in the Copac constitution-making process is yet to be told, the Copac mafia and their donors through the UNDP have become so desperate in their constitution-making fraud that they are now offering US$200 per article to anyone who is prepared to write articles supporting the Copac fraud while discrediting critics of the Copac process.” (Sunday Mail April 29 2012).
He doesn’t name a single beneficiary of this UNDP desperation. He expects Sunday Mail readers to accept this without question! A fundamental point in the writing of the new constitution is that the process is, in equal measure, a Zanu PF, MDC-T and MDC project. The three parties agreed to come up with a constitution they would put to the people through a referendum. What this means is that when the referendum comes it will be these three parties against the people; the people may or may not accept the constitution, in which case the three parties would go back to the drawing board.
If Moyo sees flaws in the current draft, fair and fine because the draft still has to go to a second all-stakeholders’ conference after which it will be debated in parliament and the draft emerging from parliament will be gazetted before being put to a referendum. So concerning the writing of the new charter, as they say, it’s morning yet on creation day!
Moyo fears elections under a new constitution because they would spell the political endgame for him and all the other unelectable but power-hungry individuals in his party.
BY NEVANJI MADANHIRE
