Resource information
This paper explores the dualities in the coexistence within Zimbabwean politics of constitutionalism and legality versus a complex combination of paralegal, supralegal, oppressive and brutal political action, especially as this pertains to elections and land. The analysis is set in the period 1999-2002. The investigation concerns the issue of how the Zimbabwe African National Unity - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government had been using a complex combination of constitutionalism-legality and the unconstitutional-paralegal to ensure political survival, despite national resistance and international pressure.Findings include:the state contested and manipulated both the practice and discourse of human rights, recasting the 'individual' and the 'liberal' in the context of 'African' and 'socialist', but with the slant to favour the government of the dayin the electoral domain ZANU-PF uses the legality of constitutionalism to aid and veil unconstitutional, arbitrary, and authoritarian means of maintaining power, and simultaneously garners the moral force of land and colonialism to create 'political immunity'ZANU-PF’s anchoring of its electoral conquest in the issue of the land and post colonial liberation superimposed forms of legitimacy and justice that tended to override paralegal and supra-legal actionthe great dilemma for Zimbabwe is to decide whether there are circumstances in which contemporary manifestations of collective and social group rights of restitution to the dispossessed should prevail over adherence to constitutional and legal procedure and justice - if the former cannot be achieved by means of the latter.[adapted from author]
