Conflict Between Zimbabwean Gov't, Judiciary Sharpens

With Zimbabwe's crisis over the land reform deepens, the country's executive and judicial branches increasingly find themselves on an irreconcilable colliding cause.

Zimbabwe's Vice President Simon Muzenda last week held a meeting with Supreme Court Chief Justice Antony Gubbay, telling him the government has lost confidence in him and his colleagues.

In response, Gubbay offered to retire on June 30, well before the end of his term in April next year.

"Over the years we have reformed the parliament and executive. The judiciary has remained untouched. There is no way we can reform some arms of the government and leave out others," said Patrick Chinamasa, minister of justice, legal and parliamentary affairs recently.

Some of the mainly white judges, he said, were carried over from the colonial government before the country's independence, hence they favor white commercial farmers and the opposition politicians in order to bring back their old good times.

The government will now move to change composition of the judiciary following the early retirement of Gubbay, Chinamasa told some other judges at a meeting, who refused to follow suit and retire.

The current drama is an obvious spill-out of the yearlong conflicts over the violent farm invasion, and ensuing "fast-track" land reform program, through which the government intends to acquire five million hectares of land from 4,500 white commercial farmers to resettle blacks crowded in poor communal areas.

The land reform and resettlement program has been on the cards since independence in 1980, but it was largely slow, with the government only managing to settle 74,000 out of a targeted 162,000 families in the first 20 years. The tardiness was largely caused by the white farmers' unwillingness to release their land on a willing-buyer-willing seller basis, and disputes over the issue between the Zimbabwean and British governments.

From February last year, some former freedom fighters have taken the justice into their hands and invaded the white farms across the country, causing casualties in many cases, and a downturn of the economy.

To cope with the situation, the Zimbabwean government introduced the accelerated or fast-track resettlement scheme, as a result of which, some 2,540 farms have been designated for resettlement. Since last June, 60,000 families had been resettled under this scheme.

But many of the white farmers appealed to the High Court and Supreme Court, hoping to win their property back.

In November 2000, the Zimbabwe Supreme Court declared the government's fast-track land reform unconstitutional, pitting itself in a "fast-track" conflict with the government.

The court has since come under increasing pressure from the government, and violent protests of some 50,000 freedom fighters, who repeatedly asked for the judges to be fired.

The fight between the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-pf), and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) further complicated the problem.

Two week ago, the ruling party caucus asked the whole bench of the High and Supreme Court judges to resign, passing a vote of no confidence in them.

On the other hand, the opposition MDC, which won 57 of the 120 contested seats in the 2000 parliamentary elections, filed petitions in the Supreme Court, to contest 37 seats which they lost, citing electoral irregularities. To fight the opposition, the government introduced legislation that tries to outlaw any proposed electoral petitions.

But the Supreme Court later ruled that the legislation contravened Zimbabwe's constitution, and allowed the MDC to challenge the 37 electoral verdicts in the courts.

This prompted violent protests from the war veterans and other mainly Zanu-pf supporters against the mainly white judges, who are urged to go and make way for people who could make more "politically correct" judgments.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly protects the mainly white-member Commercial Farmers Union and MDC under constitutional provisions, said Minister of State of Information Minister Jonathan Moyo recently, proposing replacement of the existing white judges.

Despite many judges refused to resign, the combined pressure seems to have taken toll at least in the moral of the judges, with many of whom already contemplating an exodus to other countries in the southern African region, said a report of the local newspapers.

It is apparent that the government will soon clean up the High and Supreme courts of those judges considered to be colonial, said the report filed recently, suggesting the more indigenous judges, like Judge President Godfrey Chidyausiku, who is trusted by the government for making judgments favorable to the ruling Zanu-pf, may be elevated to Chief Justice.

Chidyausiku has for long time been a favorite of the Zanu-pf government, which in 2000 appointed him to head the constitutional reform process, said the report.

Some analysts criticize the way the judiciary is being reformed by the government, but others see the reformation as leading to an indigenization of the judiciary, which is to facilitate the land resettlement for the majority landless blacks in this country of 12.5 million people of which only 1 percent are the white population.

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