Source: EDITORIAL COMMENT: Gang-rape of national charter | The Financial Gazette January 19, 2017
WITH less than four years after Zimbabweans overwhelmingly voted for a new supreme law, ZANU-PF is back to its old habits. A Bill has been introduced to give effect to the amendment of the Constitution to give President Robert Mugabe powers to appoint a Chief Justice, his or her deputy, and the judge president of the High Court.
These posts constitute the central plank in the Judiciary sine quo non to the independence or otherwise of this branch of the State. Giving rise to this knee-jerk amendment is the imminent retirement of Godfrey Chidyausiku, the Chief Justice, next month.
As is required under the existing Constitution, the Judiciary Service Commission had done its part of selecting the most suitable candidate through interviews. Apparently, this is also in tandem with international best practices.
Unfortunately, this most transparent route that is also in keeping with the principle of separation of powers with other arms of the State namely the Executive and Parliament is now hanging in abeyance because the powers-that-be do not agree with what came out of the constitution-making process and would want to handpick the next Chief Justice, like they did with Chidyausiku himself.
With a majority in Parliament, ZANU-PF shall have its way. But once again, this is another classic case of ZANU-PF’s brinkmanship, which knows no bounds. In this case, the people’s will is being subverted to satisfy the desires of an elite few, damn the consequences.
A procedure that had been put in place through an all-inclusive process in 2013 with a view to promoting transparency in the appointment of judicial officers has, all of a sudden, become an anathema to ZANU-PF because there is a particular outcome they would want to achieve by hook or crook.
But while ZANU-PF shall succeed in gang-raping the Constitution and erasing the boundaries between the three pillars of the State, at what cost has this come to a country that has become the black sheep of the world?
Following the enactment of the new Constitution, more than 300 laws were supposed to be aligned to the new charter, but none of the amendments have come through, ostensibly because the process is laborious and costly. It has taken human rights defenders to challenge some of the obnoxious laws at the Constitutional Court, but even after securing victory like in the case of the January 2016 ruling outlawing child marriages, the governing party has been dragging its feet in amending the Marriages Act.
Also, while the new Constitution abolished mandatory death sentences and limited the death penalty to cases of murder “committed in aggravating circumstances”, the subsidiary law is still to be changed to reflect this.
As far as ZANU-PF is concerned, anything that falls outside its selfish and myopic agenda of entrenching itself is immaterial even when it is for the national good.
Slowly, we are back to the cut-and-paste job perfected by the ruling party on the compromise Lancaster House Constitution, which was amended more than 20 times until it began to read like The Shadow God, the world’s worst book ever written.
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