Mugabe's party forces delay in major constitutional meeting

Jul 9, 2009, 9:41 GMT

Harare - The first major meeting of all key participants in Zimbabwe's nascent process to draft a new constitution, due to begin on Friday, has been delayed after demands from President Robert Mugabe's ZANU(PF) party, the head of the draft organizing committee said Thursday.

'ZANU(PF) wanted us to postpone it indefinitely,' Douglas Mwonzora, head of the parliamentary select committee to produce the draft, said after a meeting with MPs. 'I don't understand the strategic importance of a delay. We tried to make sense of it.'

After being rejected, the ZANU(PF) deputies then tried to have it put back to the end of July, but Mwonzora said his committee allowed it to be postponed only until Monday next week.

Monday is the deadline for the first all-stakeholders meeting set down in terms of the transitional coalition agreement signed by Mugabe and pro-democracy opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai - now prime minister - in September last year to draft a new constitution.

'The problem with this is that it can't be postponed outside the process prescribed by the global political agreement,' Mwonzora said, referring to the document that committed Mugabe and Tsvangirai to share power after a decade of brutal repression under the 85-year-old president. 'A postponement would be tantamount to an amending the agreement, and then you are assured of a chain reaction of amendments.'

The all-stakeholders meeting is due to bring together people from political parties and civic groups to set up committees that will process the demands of Zimbabweans voiced in a massive four-month outreach programme across the country, and use this to draft the new law.

Political analysts say that Mugabe is deeply anxious over the proposed new constitution as he faces a strong possibility of being voted out of power under a democratic constitution that would stipulate free and fair elections under the rule of law and an independent election authority monitored by international observers.

Every election since 2000 has been marred by extreme violence against supporters of Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change, manipulation of the voting process by Mugabe's officials and vote rigging. In June last year observers from the African Union, the Southern African Development Community and the Pan-African Parliament all dismissed the presidential run-off election as a violent fraud.

Mugabe is demanding that the constitutional drafting process consider only a document known as the Kariba draft, which was produced in 2007 by his justice minister and a former top official from the MDC meeting in the northern town of Kariba, which had no input from the public. Constitutional lawyers point out that if the Kariba was adopted, and Mugabe won a presidential election, he would be assured of another 10 years in office. He is now in his 30th year of rule, and the word's oldest head of state.