News / National
Govt ministries in hot soup for sabotaging realignment of laws
13 Oct 2014 at 05:17hrs | Views
THE Ministry of Ministry of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs has urged government ministries to speedily submit laws they want reviewed as delays were stifling efforts by the ministry to realign laws to the new Constitution.
After the new Constitution was signed into law in May last year, Government ministries were expected to identify all laws that needed to be reviewed and then submit drafts to the Ministry of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs for consideration but they have not yet done so a year after the current government was sworn into office.
Speaking at an inter-ministerial committee meeting on alignment of legislation in Harare, Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Deputy Minister Fortune Chasi said delays in aligning the laws to the Constitution was akin to sabotage.
Officials from legal departments within ministries attended the meeting where Deputy Minister Chasi encouraged them to confess if they were being sanctioned by their superiors from implementing provisions of the Constitution.
Deputy Minister Chasi said one of the loopholes in the Constitution was that it did not have timeframes on the implementation of its provisions.
Nonetheless he said, the inter-ministerial meeting was supposed to come up with a work plan on the implementation of Constitutional provisions.
He said the pace of legislative drafters was dependant on the pace of ministries in identifying sections that were not in sync with the provisions of the Constitution.
Deputy Minister Chasi said they expected legal practitioners in ministries to be professional in exercising their mandate adding that legal drafting was a legal and technical process than political.
He said there was need for officials in ministries to go beyond working hours to complete the job at hand.
Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Emerson Mnangagwa last week said Cabinet had already approved about 206 laws out of about 400 that require synchronisation with the new charter.
Source - Herald
