People’s views must reign supreme

To those who may have missed Cde Mangwana’s comments, this is what he had to say during a public debate on the constitution-making process organised by Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition:
“My conscience was telling me that we should not negotiate on the people’s views, but the MDCs would argue that this is a modern world, let’s use the best practice.
“If the people of Zimbabwe chose that they wanted mono-citizenship, we should respect that but I participated in the illegal thing of negotiating the constitution thereby compromising what the people said.
“Zanu-PF said you cannot compromise where the people had spoken adequately.”
And as we report elsewhere in this issue, Cde Mangwana insists that he has no apologies to make for consigning the people’s views to the dustbin. 
Though we already knew how the people were disenfranchised at the drafting stage, Cde Mangwana’s admission is a greater call on the parties to the GPA to re-look at the draft in its entirety.
Zanu-PF met over a four-week period to extensively audit the draft against the National Report and came up with amendments that it forwarded to the other GPA principals who are seized with the process.
The principals are set to meet over the draft next week.
We also urge the parties to officially publish the Copac Draft and the National Report in all official languages so that the people can judge for themselves if the document Copac is flaunting dovetails with their views.
The ongoing posturing by the two MDCs that they will not accept any changes to the Copac draft does not help anyone because if they insist on taking a flawed draft to the people, it will still be rejected, which will leave all parties back where they started.
The resources, in terms of money and time that were channelled to the Constitution-making process, will all have gone in vain.
This should never be allowed to happen.
A national Constitution is a crystallisation of the aspirations of the people of a self-governing territory.
Therein they define their aspirations, ethos, rights and their derogation or otherwise and how they would like to choose and be governed by their elected representatives.
As such the making of a Constitution should never be left to the whims of a group of people.
More so, outsiders have no role at all to play in such an intimately national exercise.
This is where Copac got it wrong as it roped in outsiders, among them the UN agency, UNDP, a South African lawyer, the EU and one or two Nordic countries, that are all part of the constitution-making process. Ironically, this is a process that is supposed to lay the foundation for nation building.
Nation-building starts with the articulation of national interests that should be captured in the preamble of the Constitution and run through every chapter.
The Constitution should, thus, define the national vision and map the various strategies that will help attain the vision, as such outsiders have or should have no role to play in such a sensitive exercise.
The problems encountered in the ongoing Constitution-making process, manifest in the attempt to smuggle alien concepts and decimate the foundation of the Zimbabwean State, can be traced to the involvement of alien forces.
The question we should have asked, is what is the interest of outsiders in an intimately national process?
It is not too late to rescue the Constitution-making process. The nation cannot be held hostage by a group of people who knew very well that what they were doing was outside the province of their powers.
Copac had a clear brief, translate the people’s views into legal language and use the National Report as your guide. We urge the principals to whip Copac into line.
All who were involved in the Copac debacle must apologise to the nation.