Revista de Ciências Políticas e Assuntos Públicos
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Constitution by the People or to the People: A Critical Analysis of Zimbabwe's Constitutional Development in View of the Constitution Select Committee (Copac) Led Process

Kingston Magaya

This paper examines Zimbabwe’s constitutional development and analyses the view that constitutional making processes and their substantive outcomes are a reflection of the political interests of the rulers at any given time. It traces the background to constitutional reform in Zimbabwe back to the 1979 Lancaster Constitution. A compendious analysis of the Constitutional Commission’s draft of 1999/2000 is succeeded by a discussion of the 2001 National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) draft. In the main, this paper discusses the COPAC-led constitutional-reform process and some of the challenges obtaining in the ensuing political environment. These challenges are examined in light of the elite theory of constitutional making to advance the notion that the procedures of constitution making and the contents thereof are a clear reflection of the interests of the political elites of that time. Moreover, parallels will be drawn between the Lancaster and the COPAC processes where after it will be argued that the processes were not people driven ones but were negotiated. The comparative analysis will show that theses two documents were adopted as working constitutions during their times due to the mutual consensus between the interested internecine parties as prescribed by the elite cohesion theory, which is an off shoot of the elite theory. Therefore, this study downplays the democratic and pluralist theories as key drivers of constitution making process in Zimbabwe and advances the view that constitutional making processes and outcomes reflect the fears, aspirations and interests of the rulers other than the views of the masses.