Mutumwa Mawere goes to court to reclaim his Zimbabwean citizenship

ZIMBABWE-BORN businessman Mutumwa Mawere filed an urgent Constitutional Court application on Tuesday asking the court to confirm constitutional provisions on dual citizenship and to stop the 30-day voter registration exercise until his case is finalised.

Mawere, who is South African by naturalisation, says he was forced to seek legal redress after Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede told him to renounce his foreign citizenship in order to acquire Zimbabwean identification documents.

The entrepreneur now wants the court to compel the Registrar General to give him identity documents and a Zimbabwean passport to enable him to vote in elections due by July 31, according to a ruling by the Constitutional Court last week.

Mawere says under the new constitution, citizenship by birth is not revocable and there is automatic citizenship for people born to Zimbabwean parents.

"Persons who acquire citizenship by registration are the only people who are affected in terms of registration, that's when the Registrar General has to deal with that application," Mawere added.

An individual has to be a citizen to vote in the pending polls and many Zimbabweans, especially of Malawian and Mozambican origin, are being blocked from participating in the nationwide voter registration exercise as a result of the country's controversial citizenship laws.

"So we have also applied to the Court that the purported voter registration, pursuant to the new constitution, be stopped to allow this matter to be adjudicated in court – because if our understanding is correct, then it means there could very well be more than a million people who may be affected by this misinterpretation of the law."

The Constitutional Court has to first rule on whether the application is urgent before dealing with the merits of the matter.

Meanwhile, legal expert Derek Matyszak agrees that the provisions of the new constitution provide that the person that is born in Zimbabwe is entitled to citizenship.

He said: "It (constitution) does not allow the deprivation of citizenship of a person born in Zimbabwe on the basis that they have acquired citizenship of another country. So Mudede has to apply what is in the constitution and not what he would like to be there."