Animal Farm

By Youngerson Matete and Liam Kanhenga On the 4 th  of November, 2023 the High Court of Zimbabwe issued a judgment in favor of Sengezo Tshabangu in the case of Prince Dubeko Sibanda & others versus Sengezo Tshabangu.  This was after the former members of parliament and senators went to court to contest their recall from the August House. The self-proclaimed Citizen’s Coalition for Change interim secretary general wrote a letter to the speaker of parliament and president of the senate claiming that 15 members of parliament and 9 senators had ceased to be members of the Citizen Coalition for Change. They must be ejected from parliament as per section 129(1)(k) of the constitution of Zimbabwe which states that  “if the Member has ceased to belong to the political party of which he or she was a member when elected to Parliament and the political party concerned, by written notice to the Speaker or the President of the Senate, as the case may be, has declared that the Memb...

 By Youngerson Matete  On 28 October 2023, Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa appointed the Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF), General Philip Valerio Sibanda, to the ZANU-PF Politburo as an ex-officio member during the party’s 20th Annual People’s Conference. The Politburo serves as the apex decision-making body within ZANU-PF. This appointment has sparked widespread criticism, with many observers arguing it constitutes a direct violation of Section 208(3) of the Constitution of Zimbabwe, which explicitly prohibits members of the security services from being active participants or office-holders in any political party or organisation (Constitution of Zimbabwe, 2013). Scholars such as Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) and Magaisa (2020) have long observed the historical entanglement of the military and ruling party structures in Zimbabwe, tracing its roots to the liberation war era. The inclusion of Section 208 in the 2013 Constitution was designed to address th...