Clause locking Mugabe out of polls scrapped

HARARE

A parliamentary committee leading Zimbabwe’s constitution making has been forced to drop a number of provisions, including one that would have locked President Robert Mugabe out of future polls.

A representative of Mugabe’s Zanu PF party in the Constitution Select Committee, Paul Munyaradzi Mangwana, said they had made a raft of changes to the draft supreme law.

He said this was done after realising that 70 per cent of the information used by the drafters was not part of the people’s views obtained from a 2009 outreach programme.

Mangwana said they had reviewed six of the 18 chapters of the first draft, including the one dealing with presidential term limits.

Another contentious clause sought to bar candidates above 70 years of age from participating in future polls and was seen as targeted at President Mugabe who turned 88 on Tuesday. (READ: Law bars Mugabe from Zimbabwe polls)

“Of the six chapters we have reviewed, we have made a lot of changes because we have discovered that the drafters had ignored what we instructed them to do and 70 per cent of their content was of their own invention,” Mangwana told The Herald newspaper.

“We have evidence that they were careless with their job and we had no option but to make many changes.”

He also accused the drafters of trying to sneak in a clause that would have legalised homosexuality and dual citizenship.

President Mugabe’s coalition partners, however, dismissed the claims, saying the draft constitution was not yet ready.