Back to Index

This article participates on the following special index pages:

Mugabe signed half of GPA
King Shango, Zim Net Radio
September 09, 2009

http://www.zimnetradio.com/news/zimnet271263.html

President Robert Mugabe only signed half of the Global Political Agreement, it has emerged (GPA). The entire 36-page document was ratified into law by Parliament as Constitutional Amendment 19.

But President Mugabe, however, only signed an 18-page document.

The result is potentially unenforceable as "It is impossible, legally, to have an act in two different versions - one version approved by Parliament, another by the President." The missing pages included clauses governing the mandated Constitutional revision and referendum process.

This means that the entire agreement can be declared null and void, or those pages not signed by the President are not enforceable.

The GPA is the result of negotiations that occurred after contested Presidential and Parliamentary elections in March 2008. Although now Prime Minister Tsvangirai received the majority of votes, he purportedly did not receive the necessary 501 percent required to win outright, forcing a run-off election.

Tsvangirai subsequently withdrew from the run-off over concern for the extreme levels of violence that occurred, including deaths, disappearances and torture and Mugabe was declared the winner.

The Southern African Development Committee (SADC) stepped in and negotiated a political settlement that became the GPA and is now the guarantor of this agreement.

The commitment of Zanu-PF, Mugabe's political party, to the GPA has been suspect from the beginning, including refusing to cede control of the Attorney General office and Reserve Bank.

The Zanu-PF party has also progressively chipped away at the Parliamentary majority position of Prime Minister Tsvangirai's party, MDC-T, secured in the 2008 elections through pressing criminal charges.

Furthermore, while levels of violence have abated, political violence is an on-going concern including the recent murder of an MDC activist.

A human rights lawyer said Zanu-PF's withdrawal from the SADC Tribunal and the failure to sign all pages of the GPA "are essentially contract disputes and there is no applicable court to turn where a judge can decide which terms apply and should be enforced.

"Instead, the judge is SADC," said Irene Petras of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, "who must remove the blinders of reverence towards a one time freedom fighter and see him as the leader of a party of freedom oppressors.

SADC has failed to resolve the dispute at a summit that ended Tuesday.

The issue will now be handled after an extraordinary SADC summit that will be held in three weeks to address the outstanding issues surrounding the GPA "and it must force a resolution on both these concerns," she said.

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP