The Sunday Mail
Parliament
Lincoln Towindo
THE Portfolio Committee on Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs last week tabled its report on the public hearings on Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment No.2 Bill before Parliament.
Public hearings are an essential part of lawmaking that involve an extensive consultation process across the country’s 10 provinces through public hearings consisting of written and oral submissions.
The hearings are a key stage that ensures citizen involvement in a crucial Parliamentary process and serve to bolster our democratic credentials.
They make lawmaking inclusive rather than exclusionary or elitist.
Reports from this process can be used to measure the public’s sentiment towards any proposed law while the public can also propose amendments for the House to consider.
Now, the report on the Constitutional Amendment Bill made for some curious reading.
According to the report, most submissions from the hearings were generally adverse and against most of the 27 proposed amendments.
What made the submissions curious was their likeness to the adversarial positions taken by Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) when the Bill was gazetted late last year.
It is important to note here that Government and most CSOs have had an antagonistic relationship for years now. It is, therefore, no surprise that there was general antipathy to the Amendment Bill from CSO quarters.
Unsurprisingly, the committee made rather disconcerting observations regarding the participation of CSOs in the hearings.
“However, the committee observed that there were members of CSOs who were moving from venue to venue replaying the same points and advancing the same arguments, thereby making it difficult to conclude whether these were general views or influenced views,” said the committee in its report.
“It was also apparent that the general public was not adequately conscientised on the contents of the Bill.”
This is a very serious allegation which should not be taken lightly.
If indeed CSOs interfered with this crucial Parliamentary process to influence the outcome of the public hearings, then we have a big problem on our hands.
This interference represents a threat to the integrity of the House’s processes and the Bills passed there from. You know something is wrong when such a sacrosanct process can be manipulated by a few Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) whose agendas are unknown and to the detriment of true citizen participation.
CSOs in Zimbabwe
It is an open secret that Government and CSOs are generally antagonistic.
Government has often accused some NGOs of fronting foreign agendas and working with foreign governments to effect regime change.
On the other hand, NGOs argue that they are watchdogs who are working to curb Government excesses.
It is public knowledge that the source of funding for most CSOs is not domestic, hence Government’s apprehensive and hostile posture.
There were over 1 000 NGOs registered in Zimbabwe in 2018, working across a range of areas including humanitarian aid, service organisations and political governance.
Questions have been asked about the high number of NGOs operating in Zimbabwe compared to its peer nations.
Comparatively, Zambia, which has a similar population profile to Zimbabwe’s, has just over 400 NGOs registered with their government.
Registering an NGO is, in general terms, an easy undertaking locally.
NGOs are registered under the Private and Voluntary Organisations Act through the Department of Social Welfare under the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare.
As a result of the ease with which one can register an NGO, they have proliferated over the years and their areas of focus have also evolved.
In the 1980s, the general focus was around women empowerment and income-generating projects, but they soon shifted to poverty alleviation and the environment in the 1990s before turning largely to human rights and constitutionalism at the turn of the millennium.
The emergence, post-2000, of foreign funders with deep pockets, has consequently led to further crowding of the sector.
It is this crowding that has irked authorities who have accused the majority of NGOs of deviating from their mandate and meddling in opposition politics.
Last year Government embarked on an audit of more than 700 NGOs, amid concerns that most were meddling in politics.
“We are working well with some PVOs, but there are some briefcase NGOs, those that do not stick to their mandate,” said Deputy Labour Minister Lovemore Matuke.
“They get registered on the basis of what they spell out to Government and once they are registered they do not stick to their mandate. We have another category of PVOs that have since ceased to be visible on the ground, we are also looking at all that in our 100-day cycle.
“Another category of PVOs are those that mobilise resources and channel them through humanitarian aid only in constituencies controlled by the opposition.”
Government has also mooted amending the PVO Act to allow for stricter monitoring of NGOs and full disclosure of their ownership structure and funding. These measures and more should now be put into law to curb the excesses of some delinquent NGOs.
This, however, is not a call for the muzzling and censorship of PVOs, not at all.
CSOs are a key pillar for any democracy and they should be given adequate room to operate and hold the State to account when need be. However, when we have NGOs surreptitiously manipulating democratic processes as what is alleged to have happened during the public hearings, then authorities should not shirk from wielding the sword.
Parliamentary processes should be protected from undue influence and if this means de-registering the offending CSOs, after due legal processes, so be it.
