Politburo in turmoil

Zanu-PF will convene an extraordinary politburo meeting this Wednesday to deal with the increasingly contentious constitution-making process amid growing calls from its hardliners for the party to quit the exercise and call for elections.

The meeting will be critical in determining whether President Robert Mugabe - who wants elections this year with or without a new constitution - will pull his anxious party from the constitution-making process.

Jonathan Moyo, the Zanu-PF strategist, last Sunday said it was time to delink the constitution-making process, "park it" and go for elections.

In terms of the Global Political Agreement (GPA), if one of the three parties withdraws, the agreement collapses, giving Mugabe room to unilaterally call for fresh elections. Under the GPA, Mugabe must consult Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai before announcing the election date. However, Mugabe has been threatening to go it alone.

Zanu-PF insiders say the politburo on Wednesday will decide whether Mugabe pulls out of the GPA or not to free himself to call elections without consultation.

"The next politburo meeting will be very critical because this past Wednesday we received an update on the constitution-making process from Paul Mangwana (Zanu-PF's co-chairman of the constitutional exercise) and it was clear there is not much progress and the president is getting impatient," a senior politburo member said.

"So we resolved to task our negotiators, Patrick Chinamasa and Nicholas Goche, to come up with proposals on how we should proceed on this issue. They are submitting the report today (Friday) and it will be discussed at the politburo this coming Wednesday."

Zanu-PF spokesman Rugare Gumbo confirmed these developments, including the scheduled extraordinary meeting.

Mugabe is on a warpath against the GPA and associated processes as he tries to raise the stakes to build a case for his party to pull out of the agreement and force elections.

He has even launched attacks on the Southern African Development Community (SADC) facilitator in Zimbabwe, SA President Jacob Zuma, threatening to remove him "any time in broad daylight and we have warned him of that".

Zanu-PF's anger over the proposed draft constitution has been growing in recent months, fuelled by the inordinate delays and its failure to control the process. The situation was worsened by proposals by MDC parties - with the support of some Zanu-PF officials - to come up with presidential term and age limits which would have barred Mugabe from contesting the next elections. Mugabe and his loyalists angrily rejected these proposals and removed them.

Now Zanu-PF is at war over other proposals in the draft constitution, which it claims constitute "subversive material" designed to "weaken the state" and reverse empowerment programmes.

The party also says the draft constitution seeks to whittle down Mugabe's powers and "undermine the country's territorial integrity, provide absolute rights to foreigners, substantially alter the supervision of non-governmental organisations and downplay the significance of the liberation struggle".

The constitution-making process is also currently deadlocked over issues which include dual citizenship; powers of the attorney-general and the National Prosecuting Authority; system of government; the number of deputy presidents; the position of the prime minister and devolution of power. Agreement seems to have been reached to minimise the death penalty and ban gay rights.

However, devolution is the most explosive problem facing parties in the GPA.

In a bid to disrupt the constitution-making process and rush to elections, Zanu-PF is now coming up with all sorts of proposals, including revisiting the exercise without stopping elections this year.