Online Reporter
THE third amendment to our home-generated 2013 Constitution became law on Tuesday, and ushers in a new era for Zimbabwe’s vibrant democracy.
It is easily the most critical of the three amendments with several crucial provisions to fill gaps and overcome challenges found in the past 13 years.
The first two amendments dealt with the appointment of Vice-Presidents, the need to extend the temporary measure of having more women in the House of Assembly to encourage gender equality, and extending the retirement ages of judges of the High, Supreme and Constitutional Courts to 75, if they were fit and willing.
The third amendment goes a lot further.
For a start, Parliament will now elect the President after a general election.
It will also elect a successor if the office falls vacant for any reason between general elections. Countries are generally split on whether to have direct elections to the Presidency or use Parliament as an Electoral College, but for practical reasons the Electoral College approach was seen to have many advantages.
African experience in general, and Zimbabwe’s in particular, had found that direct elections tended to produce results disputed by the losers.
The disputes arose even when one party had achieved a working majority in both houses of Parliament as there were losers who felt they should have won the Presidential election, even though the electorate had chosen another party to form the government.
The direct elections also produce candidates from outside the main political parties, either to publicise their views or to trying to be brought into the system somewhere before a run-off.
The President in this Parliamentary system has to be backed by a majority of those elected by the people, so they still decide, but the direct vote is now choosing a Parliament and President together, instead of separately.
The original Constitution had the party that won the Presidency choose a successor for a vacancy, which could cause other problems, but now Parliament grants an indisputable legitimacy.
The other large-scale change was to extend the terms of local authority councillors, members of Parliament and the President from five years to seven years.
This took care of the problem that an electoral cycle on the short side sees everyone learning the job before switching to campaigning, leaving too little time for actually doing what they are supposed to do.
Yet the Constitution still retains that absolute right of citizens to change or confirm their government at regular intervals.
Many of the other clauses in Constitution Amendment Act Number 3 make elections simpler and ensure that there are proper structures.
One long-promised amendment now returns the voters roll to the Registrar General, making it simple to enrol new voters when they obtain their national ID cards and keeping all personal data together in high security systems.
It must be noted that the whole procedure of amending the Constitution was done exceptionally peacefully, and fulfilling all requirements.
Our Constitution was drawn up by the people, in a vast number of meetings, to replace the Lancaster House Constitution, imposed after negotiations to end a war.
Those who drew up our present basic law made quite sure that all citizens retained a right to be consulted on Constitutional changes, maintaining that public input, and essentially setting practical limits to what even a two thirds majority in Parliament could or could not do.
Parliament itself, in both the National Assembly and the Senate, had a lot to say and changes were made in both Houses to make the original Amendment Bill more acceptable and work better.
One good example was a decision to continue with the position that traditional leaders cannot be involved in party politics; that reflects that they have to be able to handle people of all parties who live within their communities.
The Gender Commission also remains, as most legislators thought it was needed.
The process took some time, as legislators were determined not to be rubber stamps, but instead to get precisely what they wanted and so wanted to exercise their rights to discuss every clause and, from their collective experience, make sure that odd gaps would not emerge.
The fact that a respectable block of opposition and independent legislators eventually supported the amendments, and so ensuring that majorities were well over the required two thirds of the membership, means that the final Amendment Act has exceptional support, which is an important result.
So far as possible, Constitutional provisions should go well beyond what is needed to just pass since the Constitution sets the framework for the rest of the law.
