Zimbabwe’s CAB3 Will Make A Treasonous Coup Way More Easier If Passed

Now Zimbabwe is at it again, pioneering new methods of democratic self-destruction, this time in a bill rather than a a military squad rezvingongongo. Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 or CAB3 as everyone calls it, is scheduled to pass before September 4 this year, the point at which the current presidential term hits the three-year mark and certain constitutional protections kick in. That deadline is not a coincidence. Nothing in Zimbabwe ever is.

The government describes CAB3 as modernisation. Read the actual bill and you start to wonder what exactly is being modernised. The most dramatic change is Clause 2, which scraps the direct election of the president entirely and hands that power to a joint sitting of parliament. No more voting for your president. Parliament votes only while the rest of us people watch.

Here is where it gets interesting, and not in a good way.

Picture this: CAB3 passes. A few years from now something goes sideways. A general, or a faction, or someone with enough soldiers and ambition decides to become president like you know whom. He decides that parliament is an inconvenience and he dissolves it, then installs “acting members of parliament,” loyalists, party men, people who owe him everything. Those acting MPs convene in a joint sitting. They elect him president. Seven years, as the bill provides. Even without a popular vote being held and no one was asked. The whole chirade is clothed in constitutional procedure because CAB3 created exactly this mechanism. The keys to the presidency are now held by whoever holds parliament.

You might say that is far-fetched. Zimbabwe’s history can easily prove you wrong. We have already lived through the version where a PR typa guy military figure appeared on television and told us the president was fine, everything was fine, nothing to see here. We gave the world the template. We should know better than anyone how quickly “constitutional procedure” can be dressed up over something that would, in any honest language, be called a takeover.

Whats worse is CAB3 does not stop at the presidency. Clause 19 removes the requirement that the president appoint the Prosecutor-General on the advice of the Judicial Service Commission. He now picks the top prosecutor alone. Clause 15, easy to miss because it sounds technical, deletes the words “to uphold this Constitution” from the functions of the defence forces and replaces them with “in accordance with the Constitution.” That shift matters more than it appears. Upholding the constitution implies an active duty, a mandate to defend democratic order even against the executive. Acting in accordance with it is just following lawful orders. A military that dissolved parliament on presidential instruction could, under CAB3, argue it was simply doing its job.

Then there is Clause 12, which transfers the voters’ roll from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to the Registrar-General who is again a presidential appointee. The president’s office would control who gets registered to vote in the parliamentary elections that then produce the MPs who then elect the president. The circle is neat. The door is very nearly closed.

The public consultation and hearing process, mandatory under the constitution for a full 90 days, was compressed into less than a week of physical hearings spread across a country of 15 million people. People were reportedly bused in to fill venues. Microphones were snatched from opposition voices mid-sentence. Tendai Biti was arrested for organising against the bill. Critics who showed up were heckled and Human Rights lawyer was physically assaulted.

The Zimbabwe Council of Churches, representing 32 denominations and over three million people, called it morally indefensible. The Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission warned it undermines democratic foundations. Constitutional lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, who has seen this country’s legal architecture bent and twisted for five decades, called it totally unacceptable.

None of this is unfamiliar on the continent. Uganda, Rwanda and Cameroon all rewrote their rules when those became no longer served people in power. What is particular to Zimbabwe is the audacity of the packaging. We have a government that survived a coup by calling it something constitutional, and now writes laws making the next coup structurally cleaner, at the same time presenting the whole enterprise as democratic modernisation. We pioneered constitutional coup as a concept. Now we are apparently committed to perfecting the form.

Written submissions on CAB3 remain open until May 17. After that, a parliament where ZANU-PF holds a commanding majority debates it, and it needs a two-thirds vote to pass. The math is not complicated nor is the deadline. After all, September 4 is not far.

Zimbabwe keeps finding new ways to surprise us. The tragedy is that this time, the surprise was written in advance, published in a government Gazette.