MNANGAGWA BROKE THE CONSTITUTION TO SILENCE THE WOMAN GUARDING IT

The removal of Jessie Majome from the chair of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission tells you everything you need to know about how this regime understands the rule of law. She was placed in that office to defend the constitution. She did exactly that. And within days of doing her job, she was thrown out of it.

The official reasons offered by ZANU PF and its apologists are an insult to anyone who has ever read the constitution Majome was sworn to protect. We are told her commission lacked a quorum when it spoke. We are told there was no proper consultation. We are told that she commented on an ongoing process. We are told she went to the press before going to parliament. Four neat bureaucratic excuses, lined up in a row, designed to make a political assassination look like an administrative correction. Strip away the jargon and the truth is unavoidable. Majome was not removed for procedure. She was removed for content.

Start with the law. The Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission is established under Section 232 of the constitution as an independent body. The independence of such commissions is not decorative. It is the entire point. Section 237 sets out the only lawful grounds on which a member of an independent commission may be removed, and it requires that a tribunal recommended by the Judicial Service Commission must first find the official guilty of misconduct, incapacity or incompetence before any removal can take effect. None of this happened. Mnangagwa appointed no tribunal. The Judicial Service Commission was not approached. No finding of misconduct was ever made. Instead, the President reached for Section 202, a provision that has nothing to do with the security of tenure of an independent commissioner, and used it as a fig leaf to demote Majome to an ordinary seat on the Public Service Commission.

This is not a technical dispute among lawyers. This is a head of state openly violating the very constitution he swore to uphold, in order to punish a public official who reminded him that the same constitution still exists. If the President can dismiss the chair of an independent human rights body simply because her findings displease him, then no commission in this country is truly independent. None. The protection of every Zimbabwean citizen rests on institutions that this regime has just shown itself willing to gut the moment they become inconvenient.

The timing removes any remaining doubt. Majome’s commission had just released a damning report on the public hearings into Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 3, documenting violence, intimidation, exclusion and the silencing of citizens who came to oppose the bill. She told the country, in plain language, that CAB3 strips Zimbabweans of the right to choose their own President and concentrates power in a single office. A few days later she was reassigned. The message to every other commissioner, every judge, every civil servant, every journalist in this country is unmistakable. Speak the truth about CAB3 and your career ends on a Friday afternoon.

The four official reasons collapse the moment they are examined. The quorum complaint applies to a commission this regime itself has starved of appointments. The lack of consultation refers to a process ZANU PF rigged from the start. The objection to commenting on an ongoing process is laughable when the entire statutory function of a human rights body is to monitor processes as they unfold. And the protest that she went to the media first ignores the fact that informing the public is precisely what the commission exists to do. These are not reasons. They are the language a regime uses when it knows it has done something indefensible and still has to read a press statement.

What remains, once the excuses fall away, is the simple and ugly truth. Jessie Majome was punished because she defended the constitution at a moment when ZANU PF needed it broken. The same regime that did this to her is now demanding that the nation trust it with even greater power through CAB3. No Zimbabwean serious about the future of this country should grant that trust. The treatment of Majome is the preview. CAB3 is the full performance.