Time for Copac to pack up and drafters to drift away

As confusion continues to reign in Copac, the startling disclosure by Cde Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana that 70 percent of the treacherous content of Copac's first draft constitution published by The Herald on February 10 was in fact invented by Moses Chinengo, Brian Crozier and Priscilla Madzonga has served to draw national attention to the fact that more than 70 percent of the views of the people expressed during the Copac outreach programme contained in the as yet unpublished Copac national report actually uphold the institutional pillars, values and provisions of the current constitution as amended.

The telling words attributed to Cde Mangwana by this newspaper yesterday were that " . . . we (Copac) have made a lot of changes (to the initial draft published by The Herald on February 10) because we have discovered that the drafters had ignored what we instructed them to do and 70 percent of their content was of their own invention".

Just think about the staggering implications of what Cde Mangwana told the nation through The Herald â€" 70 percent of the content of Copac's first draft constitution is the invention of three overzealous drafters, namely, Chinengo, Crozier and Madzonga whose Copac contracts are said to have expired last month.

In other words, instead of drafting a new constitution on the basis of the views of the people, the drafters treacherously drifted from those views by inventing their own views. Now if this is not criminally scandalous beyond description, then nothing is. This fact alone not only proves that Copac's first draft is so organically flawed as to be beyond mechanical clause-by-clause correction  but it also necessitates the non-renewal of the contracts of the drafters if those contracts have indeed expired or their immediate dismissal if their contracts are still valid.

Otherwise there's no fat chance in hell that these three Machiavellian drafters who have corrupted their role can ever enjoy any national confidence or can be given any benefit of the doubt because they are just bad news and they cannot be taken seriously at all as neutral and professional legal drafters.

In fact, these drafters are an unmitigated disaster and they must be shown the door through which to exit with their invented 70 percent constitutional treachery immediately rather than later. In the meantime, this fiasco of a circus over drafters who have become drifters has served to expose four propositions on Zimbabwe's current constitution-making exercise none which has hitherto been given due attention.

The first three of the four propositions outlined below are scandalous in that they render the whole Copac process utterly useless while the last proposition is salutary in that it confirms and affirms our country's rationality as reflected in the constitutional views that Zimbabweans expressed, perhaps inadvertently but certainly poignantly under the ever guiding spiritual hands of Mbuya Nehanda and King Lobengula, during Copac's outreach programme in favour of the institutional pillars and values of our current constitution as amended. Consider each of the four propositions.

In the first place, Copac has a problem of structure or organisation in so far as it does not have a clear legal basis or clear legal parameters.

Although in name Copac is a Select Committee of Parliament in reality it has had nothing to do with Parliament such that there's nothing parliamentary about it. Nothing at all! Instead Copac has operated like a treacherous unit with mafia-like trappings.

Members of Parliament, including those in Copac minus the co-Chairs, are ignorant of what is going on with the constitution-making exercise and yet they are supposed to be the owners and drivers of Copac.  Unlike all other committees of Parliament, Copac has not been reporting to the Legislature nor has it been accountable to it. In fact, there's no law, no procedures and no rules governing Copac outside the very ambiguous provisions of Article VI of the GPA which itself has no legal standing or force save for those of its aspects which found expression in Constitutional Amendment Number 19 all of which will fall away with the imminent and necessary demise of the GPA and none of which deal with the constitution-making exercise.

The only notable structural components of Copac are its co-Chairs and its so-called Management Committee which in fact is the team of GPA negotiators who have no legal standing in Parliament or under any law of the land. Neither the co-Chairs nor the Management Committee of Copac have any proven or demonstrable competence or capacity to run or oversee a constitution-making exercise.

What has fatally weakened Copac co-Chairs and their so-called Management Committee is that one of the three parties is leaderless as the nation still does not know whether that party is still called MDC M for Arthur Mutambara or is now MDC N for Welshman Ncube. While Ncube has managed to put his functionaries in the Copac structures he has failed to become a principal because that position has continued to be occupied by Mutambara who has no representatives in Copac. This means that in structural terms Copac is both a legal and political nonsense in the national scheme of things. Why then are we allowing this nonsense to continue as if we do not see the damage it poses to the national interest?

In the second place, and because it does not have a well-established and clear legal or formal structure, Copac has become a polluted and corrupt process in that it has thus far operated in an opaque manner with no national accountability for its actions or lack thereof such that its co-Chairpersons have been a law onto themselves, always groping in the dark and always doing things driven by their whims and caprices under the supervisory cover of a manifestly incompetent Management Committee that has no status in Parliament or under any law and some of whose hopeless members would not even recognise a constitution if it smacked them on their bemused faces.

The point here is that this Copac has no legal accountability whatsoever because it is based on the GPA which is a political agreement between three political parties and which therefore has no legal basis whatsoever. Anything with no legal basis cannot be national.  And anything which is not national cannot be legal and thus cannot be binding. This is the fate of the Copac process: it is not legal, it is not national, it is not accountable and it is therefore not binding.

Thirdly, and given Copac's lack of a clear and well defined legal structure or basis and further given Copac's lack of a well-defined modus operandi arising from its lack of a proper legal structure with binding accountability, the drafting of a new constitution under Copac has become a totally corrupt and useless exercise because the principal legal drafters have found it irresistibly tempting, as probably would anyone else under similar circumstances, to invent and author a constitutional agenda of their own or of some hidden sponsors who have been sought to abuse constitution-making to effect illegal regime change in Zimbabwe since the days of the Constitutional Commission in 1999.

It is now very clear that the views of the people are not wanted in this current constitution-making process under Copac. In fact, while Cde Mangwana claims that the drafters, who must be given the boot, invented 70 percent of their own content into the first Copac draft constitution published by the Herald on February 10, anyone who has read that draft and who has also read Copac's unpublished national report will tell you that actually some 95 percent of what is in the first draft was invented by the drafters working in collusion with whoever has been treacherously assisting them within Copac or has been deviously sponsoring them behind the scenes.  

Lastly, and whereas Copac' does not have a clear and proper legal structure and whereas this has led to an opaque, unaccountable and thus corrupt process which has given Copac's principal drafters a free dirty hand to invent what Cde Mangwana has said is 70 percent of their own content, it is instructive to note that up to 90 percent of the views of the people gathered during the Copac outreach programme that have been ignored by the wayward drafters who have become drifters are actually a confirmation of the current Constitution of Zimbabwe as amended.

In other words, what the embattled Copac leadership has not been either willing or able to tell Zimbabweans and the so-called international community, especially Sadc, about the outcome of its outreach programme is that at least some 90 percent of the views expressed by the people essentially confirm and affirm the foundational institutional pillars and values of the current Constitution of Zimbabwe as amended 19 times beyond Lancaster.

This is the fact that Copac has not been decent enough to acknowledge with the result of creating a circus. Indeed, this is the fact that the evil scheming drafters who became drifters were desperate to subvert when they invented what Cde Mangwana says was their own 70 percent content which in point of fact was some 95 percent of evil content against the documented wishes of the people. In these circumstances, the time has come for Copac which is neither legal nor national to pack its bags and go.

An honest reading of Copac's unpublished national report which incidentally was published by the Herald in December 2011 shows beyond any doubt that the majority of Zimbabweans support the current Constitution as amended and that therefore there's an unassailable constitutional basis for formally ending the GPA whose tenure has in fact expired to allow the holding of elections under the current Constitution as confirmed and affirmed by the majority of Zimbabweans during the Copac outreach programme.