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month as Copac starts the final phase of drafting the document.
Copac co-chairperson Cde Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana said yesterday that the document would be put to a referendum early next year.
Cde Mangwana was speaking on the sidelines of a pre-drafting workshop for the new constitution held at Great Zimbabwe.
“We will soon start the drafting of the new supreme law of the land that should take us at most two weeks and we are quite on schedule to complete the writing of the new constitution before the end of this year,” he said.
“We are very optimistic that we will be able to give the people of Zimbabwe a Christmas present in the form of a draft constitution, which we are quite sure will be through before Christmas and that will pave way for a referendum early next year,” said Cde Mangwana.
There are challenges ranging from lack of adequate finances and disputes among the three main political parties involved in the writing of the new constitution.
“After we complete the drafting of the new constitution, we will then move on to the Second All Stakeholders’ Conference and we are happy that we have already secured funding for the drafting stage, but we are still to get funding for the Second All Stakeholders Conference,” he said.
Cde Mangwana said Copac required a further US$4,6 million from Government to hold the Second All Stakeholders’ Conference.
He said they convened the pre-drafting seminar attended by legal experts and social scientists to make sure drafters give a legal interpretation to what the people said.
Another Copac co-chairperson, Mr Douglas Mwonzora, said the writing of the new constitution would involve a lot of compromises, especially by the three main political parties – Zanu-PF, MDC and MDC-T.
“We are not going to come up with a draft document that pleases everyone,” he said. “Some will be happy about some aspects of the new constitution and also disappointed about other aspects. No political point will have its way throughout and when such a situation obtains then we know we have a good draft constitution.”
During the two-day pre-drafting seminar, Copac would come up with a framework for drafting the new constitution and extraction of constitutional issues.
Online Reporter