CRIS CHINAKA, Harare | Thursday
ZIMBABWE remains poised on the brink of a new political crisis as Chief Justice Anthony Gubbay seems set to defy an order by President Robert Mugabe’s government to take early retirement.
The confrontation between Gubbay and Mugabe was set to peak at midnight on Wednesday, when the government said it would cease to recognise Gubbay as the head of the judiciary.
The government is expected to name a successor on Thursday.
But the judge, who has challenged Mugabe’s right to use presidential decrees to bypass the constitution on several issues, has vowed to fight early retirement.
Information Minister Jonathan Moyo last week accused Gubbay and other top judges of favouring the opposition and the country’s small white community.
Mugabe, as part of a sweeping crackdown on his critics ahead of a presidential vote next year, has tried to sack other judges and threatened to reverse past appointments to the judiciary he felt were inappropriate.
In a letter to Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, Gubbay’s lawyer said the judge had withdrawn his offer to go on leave in March and retire a year ahead of schedule in June because the government appeared bent on dismissing him and appointing his successor irregularly.
Lovemore Madhuku, a law lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, said the dispute could erupt into a constitutional crisis.
It’s bad enough that we are in this stand-off. But things will get really worse when we have two judges, each claiming he is the chief justice,” he said.
Chinamasa told parliament the government wanted to replace Gubbay with Judge President Godfrey Chidyausiku, a political ally who once served as a deputy minister.
Emmanuel Magade, a law lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, said the effort to remove Gubbay had compromised the independence of the judiciary.
”The government has no authority except in very special circumstances to force a judge out, and so this clearly looks like a coup against the judiciary,” he said.
The Supreme Court has made several rulings against Mugabe’s plan to seize white-owned farms for landless blacks, and also nullified a decree forbidding the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) from challenging results from last June’s parliamentary elections.
Meanwhile, Britain is preparing to withdraw military training staff from Zimbabwe in protest at the lack of rule of law in the country, and attacks on the judiciary and media, an independent weekly said.
The Financial Gazette quoted unnamed diplomatic sources as saying that preparations for the pull-out of the British Military Advisory and Training Team (BMATT), who have been in Zimbabwe since 1979, were under way.
It said the experts would be out of the country by the middle of this year.
The team has remained in the country, playing mainly an advisory role and providing peacekeeping training courses to the Zimbabwe national army and regional forces. – Reuters