Copac has defended the draft of the country’s new governance charter saying the supreme law was based on 26 constitutional principles extracted from public hearings.
Two of the co-chairpersons in the country’s constitution-making body, Munyaradzi Paul Mangwana (Zanu PF) and Douglas Mwonzora (MDC-T), yesterday said the draft constitution was extracted from public views.
They rubbished reports in some sections of the media suggesting the drafters of the new governance charter had adopted a foreign draft constitutional model and dumped contributions made by the public during the outreach programme.
“The truth about the constitution that Copac is crafting for the country will come out very soon and media reports that we dumped people’s views are not true,” Mangwana said.
“We wrote the contents in the draft constitution on the basis of what people said during the constitutional outreach programmes and such media reports are misleading and were written by people ignorant of the constitution-making process.”
Mwonzora added: “The media reports are rubbish and were written by people who are scrambling for reasons to discredit Copac. We crafted the new constitution based on 26 constitutional principles and these were extracted from what the people said and the drafters were guided by these 26 principles.”
He said some of the principles that guided Copac included the supremacy of the constitution, gender equality, observance of human rights, good governance, fair distribution of land to address colonial imbalances, devolution and decentralisation of power and others.
Last weekend,Goodson Nguni, leader of the Federation of Non-Governmental Organisations (Fongo), a suspected Zanu PF-aligned outfit, accused Copac of subverting people’s wishes.
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But Mwonzora said: “These principles provided guidelines to the constitutional draft and all political parties and groups were represented during the discussions.”
The writing of the new constitution started three years ago and has been stalled on several occasions due to disagreements among political parties driving the process.
