Professor Lovemore Madhuku says he will lead a process to write a new, “people-driven” Constitution to replace the current one which was a product of negotiation between Zimbabwe’s main political parties, zanu-pf and MDC formations in 2013.

Prof Madhuku, a law lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), is a perennial campaigner for constitutionalism and his party, the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), was born out of a movement advocating for a new national charter at the turn of the millennium.

Prof Madhuku says his party is not anachronistic as it is also focused on addressing major socio-economic challenges facing the country.

“If we succeed in our endeavours, this country will get a genuinely new, democratic and people-driven Constitution,” he said in an interview yesterday.

“The (2013 (Constitution-making) process was a defective process; the process was actually a zanu-pf and MDC process which was then sold under the misleading notion that it was the people but we all know that the Constitution did not come from the people — it came from those two political parties and we can never be cheated. That is why we are standing alone as a party and the future will know that the generations of 2013 were cheated by the two political parties and the NCA is going on to the political stage to demolish that.

“So, we will certainly urge a new process that will repeal the current constitution. The current constitution cannot be a constitution: it is so much centred on one person — the President — and that cannot be a Constitution.”