Have the Time-limits Been Met So Far?
No they haven’t. When the preliminary report was presented to the President on the 26th December, a government spokesman said:
“In terms of the law, His Excellency is required to cause the report to be tabled before the Parliament of Zimbabwe within seven working days from the date of presentation of the said report.”
With respect, this is incorrect. Section 161(7) of the Constitution says the preliminary report must be laid before Parliament “within seven days”, not seven working days. When the Constitution says “days” it means what it says. This is clear from section 336(3), which provides that:
“Whenever the time for doing anything in terms of this Constitution ends or falls on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday, the time extends to … the next day that is not a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday.”
This provision would be unnecessary, indeed meaningless, if Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays – non-working days – are to be excluded from any period, because in that event a period could not possibly end on a non-working day.
Correctly construed, section 161(7) of the Constitution required the President to cause the preliminary delimitation report to be laid before Parliament within seven actual days from the 26th December, when he received it. In other words, he should have summoned Parliament to meet by the 3rd January at the latest. On the same construction, section 161(8) requires the President to return the preliminary report to ZEC within 14 actual days from the date on which it should have been laid before Parliament, i.e. by the 17th January.
Does the failure to meet the time-limits matter?
Any failure to comply with the Constitution is to be deprecated, but in this case the failure probably does not invalidate what has been done so far because if it did it would mean that the entire delimitation process would be nullified because of a failure to meet a time-limit by a couple of days.
On the other hand, the failure to meet the constitutional time-limits does mean that publication of the final delimitation report will be pushed closer to the ultimate deadline, the 28th January, after which the new electoral boundaries cannot be used for the mid-year general election. Parliament’s consideration of the preliminary report will be restricted to just two days, and ZEC will have only nine days to decide what to do about Parliament’s recommendations and to publish its final report.
Conclusion
There are two morals here:
- Always follow the Constitution, and
- Don’t leave things to the last minute.
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