The Zimbabwe government has published a draft Bill to overhaul the country’s Constitution and provide for the re-introduction of a two-chamber Parliament, the state-run Ziana news agency said on Saturday.
The news agency cited an extraordinary government gazette published on Friday saying the proposed changes sought to confirm the country’s controversial land reform that started in 2000 and have been blamed by critics for driving the once bread basket of the region into an importer of food.
President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party got a two-thirds majority, which it had bayed for during the last Parliamentary elections to enable it to make constitutional amendments to the southern African country’s supreme law drafted in 1979 in Britain.
The Constitution has so far been amended at least 16 times.
A government-sponsored draft Constitution was rejected in a referendum in 2000, sparking the mass invasion of white-owned farms by pro-government supporters.
A pro-democracy grouping, the National constitutional Assembly (NCA) has been fighting for a homegrown Constitution for several years now, but has been dismissed by government.
Mugabe said in the run-up to elections that he wanted a two-thirds majority in Parliament to enable him to change the Constitution.
Over the last five years, the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) has not been able to change the Constitution because it lacked a two-thirds majority after the opposition MDC won nearly half of the 120-constested seats in the previous elections.
But in the last polls, the MDC won only 41 of the 120 seats. Mugabe has powers to appoint another 30 members to Parliament under the current laws.
Under the proposed amendments, 65 more members will be appointed to Parliament as the senate.
The looming return of a bicameral Parliament, consisting of a senate and lower house has been met with mixed feelings.
Critics described it as a way to accommodate Mugabe’s loyals who failed to make it through the ballot box during the disputed March 31 polls.
”Zimbabweans do not need a senate that will serve as a graveyard for dumping Zanu-PF election losers,” ousted former information minister Jonathan Moyo had said in his manifesto in the run-up to the March Parliamentary elections.
Pro-democracy grouping NCA has also dismissed piecemeal attempts at changing the country’s highest laws.
”What Zimbabwe needs is a whole new Constitution and not this tinkering with choice bits, especially where other areas are in urgent need of reform such as the trimming down of executive powers and broadening human rights to democratic levels,” said NCA spokesperson Jessie Majome.
But a columnist in the state-run Herald newspaper Donald Charumbira supported the senate saying it was ”a safeguard against hastily-authored legislation that may not be in the national interest.”
The proposed Bill also seeks to confirm the establishment of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, the group that ran the March 2005 legislative polls.
The Bill is expected to be submitted to Parliament within 30 days. – Sapa-AFP