HARARE – Zimbabwe’s constitutional conference has been delayed to Monday after President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU PF party objected to the meeting taking place tomorrow as had been scheduled.Douglas Mwonzora, a co-chairperson of a special parliamentary committee leading the constitutional reform process, said the committee met yesterday and resolved to change the date of the conference and to also cut its duration to two days instead of the originally planned four days due to budgetary concerns.
“Having taken into considerations the concerns of ZANU PF and the timeline given in the global political agreement (GPA), the committee decided to move the conference to Monday,” Mwonzora told ZimOnline in an interview.
“We had no mandate to vary the timeline in the GPA. We were confined by the GPA to have the conference on or before July 13. The conference will run for one-and-half days,” said Mwonzora, who is a member of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party.
Mwonzora chairs the parliamentary committee along with ZANU PF’s Paul Mangwana and David Coltart, a legislator from the smaller MDC formation led by Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara.
The move by the parliamentary committee to shift the conference dates was a major climb down after it initially met on Tuesday and refused to bow down to ZANU PF’s request.
The committee apparently backed down fearing further delay after ZANU PF legislators wrote to the party’s leadership requesting that Mugabe, Tsvangirai and Mutambara meet to resolve the dispute over dates of the conference, a development that would have caused even more delays and probably throw the constitutional reform exercise of course.
In demanding postponement of the conference, ZANU PF said there was need to determine who were the stakeholders to send representatives to the key convention and also said logistical matters had to be ironed out before delegates could start travelling from around the country to Harare.
Meanwhile, the government controlled daily newspaper – The Herald – yesterday quoted unnamed ZANU PF lawmakers complaining that the Tsvangirai-led MDC had hijacked the constitution-making process.
Some of the lawmakers accused ZANU PF members in the select committee of allowing "MDC-T legislators in the Select Committee to run the show by themselves".
* Zimonline
