Zimbabwe News Online: Makarau demoted to supreme court

Makarau demoted to supreme court
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The Zimbabwean on 31 May, 2010 01:50:00
 
Makarau was “promoted” to the Supreme Court in a controversial shake-up of
Zimbabwe’s judiciary by President Robert Mugabe last week. She was replaced as
Judge President by former Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) chairman George
Chiweshe, a former army officer whose controversial term as head of ZEC saw
stoked up tensions within the country’s political establishment.
London-based think-tank Africa Confidential said Makarau apparently disappointed
Mugabe and other Zanu (PF) bigwigs through her failure to allocate cases to
judges sympathetic to the party. “The President’s Office thinks Makarau
lacks the political antennae to match sensitive cases to accommodating
judges,” said Africa Confidential. Over the past decade, the bench has been
effectively packed with judges compromised by offers of farms.
While the courts have from time to time ruled against Zanu (PF) interests, they
have in the majority of cases related to elections or the troublesome land issue
passed judgments that have largely favoured the perceived position of Mugabe and
his party.  Chiweshe, who was chairman of a previous discredited electoral
commission, is deeply unpopular with Mugabe’s opponents after holding onto
election results for five weeks in the watershed March 2008 vote, which saw
Mugabe trail Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round of voting.
The 86-year-old went on to win the run-off, which MDC-T leader Tsvangirai
boycotted citing massive violence against his supporters. Analysts say
Chiweshe’s new job is strategic in the context of future elections as he will
single-handedly pick judges from the High Court bench to sit on the Electoral
Court to preside over all election related disputes.
The new Judge President was a High Court judge before being deployed to chair
the now defunct electoral commission. Zimbabwe’s elections have for the past
decade been marred by violence, human rights abuses and allegations of rigging,
with the courts stepping in to decide on disputes.
The southern African country has always had troubled elections since 2000, with
disputes spilling into the courts, but this has rarely changed the outcome, with
some Supreme Court judgments being delivered when the life of a parliament has
expired and fresh elections are due.
But opposition parties have complained about many of the rulings by the courts.
The Electoral Court has the power to declare election results null and void on
the grounds of fraud, violence and intimidation, ballot tampering and can
disqualify a winning candidate and order a re-run.
When the Chiweshe-led electoral commission sat on the March 2008 poll results,
the MDC filed an urgent application to the Electoral Court to have them
released, but the court threw out the application.
A new Zimbabwe Electoral Commission was named last month and is chaired by
Simpson Mutambanengwe, a consensus figure who served at the Zimbabwe High Court
before moving to the Namibian bench where he worked for more than a decade,
including as acting chief justice. Mutambanengwe’s commission will run  the
next elections but like its Chiweshe-led predecessor will have to rely on the
Electoral court to decide on disputes related to polls.