IN my last instalment, I hinted at the vigorous arguments being made to defend the Office of the President and any person occupying that office from defamation and demonisation.
A substantial amount of the damage to Zimbabwe’s regional and international standing in the last 18 years had been achieved through the reckless filing of dubious cases before judicial and quasi-judicial bodies which gave ‘judges’ opportunities to savage the reputation of Zimbabwe and its President for propaganda purposes.
It is important to understand that the same Africans who celebrate their power to change leaders through proverbs such as: Ushe imhute; Ushe idova; and Ushe makota; also go on to say: Ishe itsime.
The first three proverbs are meant to remind the person who has been honoured to occupy the position of leadership that those who put her or him there can change the said leader any time they decide.
But the third proverb is directed at society in relation to the institution of leadership, not the person as such.
The leader, while she is in her office, is a like well, a spring, an oasis or a fountain, the hub of the moral ecology of the community.
The institution is sacred.
The African objection to the neoliberal campaign to remove legal protections for the Office of the President against gratuitous disrespect and defamation is that this would institutionalise disrespect.
The courts have already been abused routinely as platforms for launching dubious cases for the purpose of demonising that office.
And they will continue to be so abused because what the neoliberals want is to make it impossible for the President to fight back even in the same courts where dubious judgments are routinely made to rubbish the institution and the country.
It was not the President or his officers who sought to abuse the courts by being unnecessarily defensive of the reputation of the institution of the Presidency and the reputation of Zimbabwe.
It was the illegal regime change network sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon powers which hired lawyers to file the most dubious cases against Zimbabwe, not in pursuit of cogent law, but for the purpose of cheap propaganda, as follows:
In 2010, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) decided that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and associations in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region enjoyed legal standing before the Commission for the purpose of condemning the African land revolution in Zimbabwe and reversing Zimbabwe’s Constitutional Amendment Number 17 then. Because NGOs and associations were global citizens, they or their members did not have to have lost land to the revolution in order to have legal standing before the Commission. Indeed the ACHPR subsequently proceeded to rule that it was a violation of human rights for dispossessed Zimbabweans to reclaim their land from white settlers whose parents stole that land from Africans.
Beginning in 2008 the so-called SADC Tribunal, whose own legal standing was in dispute, proceeded to issue a series of illegal, but damning judgments against Zimbabwe’s African land reclamation movement and land distribution programme.
The Tribunal’s wild judgments were ruled null and void by Zimbabwean courts and the SADC Summit in 2012 in Maputo was forced to suspend the Tribunal.
In May 2012 Judge Hans Fabricius of the North Gauteng Court in South Africa issued a bogus judgment purporting to direct the South African National Prosecuting Authority to go into Zimbabwe and hunt down Zimbabwean citizens allegedly convicted in absentia in South Africa of committing human rights violations on Zimbabwean soil.
On September 20 2012, Judge R W Nugent of the Supreme Court of South Africa directed the South African state, against international law, to allow the seizure and sale of Zimbabwe’s embassy properties in that country and to use the proceeds to pay reparations to Rhodesian white settlers who claimed that they lost their land to the African land reclamation movement in Zimbabwe.
Back home in Zimbabwe, there was the case of the so-called African Consolidated Resources (ACR), (which is in fact British and not African), where the High Court, through Justice Charles Hungwe, ruled on September 24 2009 that the Government of Zimbabwe had no right to cancel ACR’s licence to mine diamonds at Chiadzwa in Marange. The court went further to rule that 130 000 carats of diamonds forfeited by the company to the state should be returned to ACR.
This judgment took place in the context of an on-going campaign by the Anglo-Saxon axis to maintain and intensify illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe and to poison the Kimberly Process in order to have Zimbabwe’s diamonds condemned and barred from the international market as ‘blood diamonds’.
Such condemnation would equate Zimbabwean diamonds with diamonds from a ‘war-zone’.
However, it turned out that ACR was not properly licenced.
Justice Hungwe was then forced to rescind his earlier judgment against the state.
Perhaps the crowning example was Judge Chris Nicholson’s political judgment in the KwaZulu Natal High Court, in September 2008, which was timed to overshadow former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s successful diplomacy in Zimbabwe.
This was a crowning case not only for dragging extraneous political comment into a supposed court judgment, but also for its double use: destroying Mbeki’s presidency and demonising Mbeki’s relationship with President Mugabe (Zimbabwe.)
In Eight Days in September: The Removal of Thabo Mbeki, by Reverend Dr Frank Chikane, who was the director-general of the South African Presidency as well as Chief Secretary to Cabinet under former South African President Thabo Mbeki, Chikane writes:
“The fatally flawed judgment that was later dismissed by the judges of the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) was the trigger to the removal of Mbeki from office.
“Clouds had been gathering for some time, but by the week of 12 to 19 September 2008, those occasioned by the (Chris) Nicholson judgment were ominous and began to suggest that Mbeki could be removed from office.”
It did not matter that the Supreme Court of South Africa ruled Judge Nicholson’s political attack on Mbeki to be totally misplaced.
The damage had been done.
Mbeki’s diplomatic triumph against imperialism in Zimbabwe was buried. Subsequently, Mbeki himself was unprocedurally removed from office.
That is how serious the crime of defamation is.