If you graduated from the University of Zimbabwe after 1996, chances are that your academic transcript bears the signature of Ngaatendwe Takawira. She has been the Deputy Registrar (Academic) of the university since 1996.
On 7th October 2015, she was suspended by her boss, the Vice Chancellor, Professor Levy Nyagura. Her crime is that she allegedly “failed to provide the appropriate cap for the Chancellor’s graduation academic attire†for the recent graduation ceremony on 2nd October 2015.
According to the Vice Chancellor’s letter of suspension, this caused a 45-minute delay to the graduation ceremony resulting in “an embarrassing situation for the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellorâ€. The Vice Chancellor also accused her of having provided “small caps†for the Chancellor and Vice Chancellor at the 2014 graduation ceremony. Thus, in essence, for allegedly supplying ill-fitting graduation caps to President Mugabe, the Chancellor, Takawira faces the sack.
As a result, Takawira has been hauled before a disciplinary committee, whose members were hand-picked by the Vice Chancellor and all but one are his subordinates. Takawira is refuting the charges and challenging her suspension. She asked members of the disciplinary committee to recuse themselves, since they were hand-picked by the Vice Chancellor, who is also the complainant in the case, a circumstance which makes him the prosecutor, judge and jury in the case. This application for recusal has been rejected and now Takawira has approached the Labour Court, with an application for review.
Legally, Takawira has firm grounds to challenge the glaring procedural unfairness in this matter. She can also seek constitutional protection in the right to fair administrative conduct guaranteed under s. 68 of the Constitution and the right to a fair hearing, also guaranteed under s. 69 of the same. The UZ is a public body that performs a public function, which qualifies the conduct of its officers within the definition of administrative conduct under s. 332 of the Constitution.
But it’s not the merits or otherwise of the case that are of concern in this matter. It is the sheer absurdity of it and the damage it causes to the person whom the university authorities are purportedly trying to defend. President Robert Mugabe is the Chancellor of the UZ. The Vice Chancellor says Takawira caused “embarrassment†to the President, but unbeknown to him, it is his act of sacking a senior university employee and hauling her before a hand-picked disciplinary committee which actually causes serious embarrassment and damage to the President.
Local media has picked up on the case, but it is the international dimension that is more corrosive. “If the cap doesn’t fit … you may lose your job, discovers suspended Mugabe officialâ€, writes Simon Allison for the Guardian newspaper: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/30/university-cap-mortar-board-size-mugabe-official?CMP=twt_gu%3FCMP%3Dtwt_gu From there it has been picked up by others.
Already, international media are having a field day and it is Mugabe, not Nyagura or the university, who is the subject of ridicule. It is these bizarre cases which provide fodder for stand-up comedians and political satirists around the world, for here is a ludicrous case, which fits perfectly into the narrative which characterises Mugabe as a crazy and eccentric dictator who punishes people even for the slightest missteps. It’s a story that portrays Mugabe as a control-freak who metes out severe, unreasonable and disproportionate punishment for the smallest offences. This is what Nyagura does not seem to grasp. Like most who think they are protecting or pleasing Mugabe, is their irrational and disproportionate actions that causes their boss more embarrassment.
The point here is that when these bizarre stories spread outside Zimbabwe, they are no longer just a case of the Vice Chancellor against his Deputy Registrar, but they become cases of Mugabe versus an individual citizen, a giant deploying a hammer to kill a fly. To the world, the man engineering this absurd sacking of a senior university official is Mugabe, not Nyagura. Consequently, the man whose image suffers is Mugabe, not Nyagura.
Yet the irony is that people like Nyagura believe they would be doing good by Mugabe. But in truth they are doing long-lasting harm to his reputation, as he comes out looking far worse, portrayed as he is by the cases, as an intolerant man, prone to do the most unreasonable things.
Presidential Insult Laws
This point has, thankfully, been recognised by the Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land, which has rebuked the NPA, the national prosecuting service, for brining to court numerous cases in which Zimbabweans have been accused of insulting the President. S. 33 of the Criminal Law (Codification) Act criminalises behaviour that undermines the authority of or insults the President. Scores of people, ordinary citizens and opposition politicians have been arrested and charged with this offence in recent years. These people have challenged the constitutionality of this provision and in most cases, the prosecuting authorities have withdrawn the charges, but not before accused persons have spent some time in police cells following arrest.
One of these cases involved Douglas Mwonzora, now Secretary-General of the MDC-T, who was accused of having insulted Mugabe by referring to him as a “goblin†at a 2009 political rally. Another was about a young woman from Bulawayo, arrested after sending a message on WhatsApp, the social-networking platform, which contained a caricature of Mugabe in the nude. In yet another case, a man was arrested after telling a fellow reveller at a pub that he would make use Mugabe’s campaign poster, bearing his image, as cleaning paper in the toilet. Mwonzora, had also been arrested in another case, for having allegedly insulted Mugabe’s portrait hanging on the walls of a court-room. And in 2013, Solomon Madzore, the former MDC-T Youth Assembly leader was charged with insulting the Mugabe after likening him to a ‘limping donkey’ during a speech at a campaign rally. There have been many such bizarre cases, where ordinary citizens have been arrested for allegedly insulting Mugabe.
When the Mwonzora matter came to the Constitutional Court, the judges were distinctly unimpressed by the conduct of the law enforcement and prosecution authorities, believing that the cases were a waste of judicial time.
“Why are you bringing such matters to the Constitutional Court?†asked an unimpressed Chief Justice, Mr Godfrey Chidyausiku, clearly showing his displeasure. “The president is not a goblin and we all know that. Why should the law bother itself about it?†he asked further, before adding, “You have to be an imbecile to believe that the president is a goblin.â€
The Chief Justice went further and said: “Politicians call each other names such as weevils and Gamatox; are you suggesting that you prosecute people for that? If somebody calls the president a weevil or Gamatox, are you going to prosecute that person? It is part of the trade of politicsâ€.
The Chief Justice insinuated that bringing such trivial cases to court was more of an insult to the President. In doing this, he demonstrated wisdom in reading the situation, in a manner that has eluded the law enforcement and prosecution authorities, who have been quite overzealous in their use of the presidential insult laws, even for the most trivial of cases. The Chief Justice was cognizant of the fact that the trading of insults was part of the political game. Indeed, President Mugabe himself uses tough and sometimes, harsh and insulting language against his political opponents. As the Chief Justice stated, it is an accepted, if unhealthy, “part of the trade of politicsâ€.
The Government made a climb-down in response to the judicial rebuke, with the then Minister of Information, Professor Jonathan Moyo taking a cue from the Chief Justice’s words and saying, “There’s no reason why a constitutional democracy such as ours should use the law to discipline imbeciles and idiots in politics and the mediaâ€. You would have thought this would signal a halt in the use of such laws but, worryingly, lessons have not been heeded and the presidential insult law continues to be deployed, bringing more ridicule to the presidency. Just a few days ago, VOA Studio 7 reported that one Tendai Musonza, an opposition activist had been arrested in the small town of Chinhoyi, for allegedly mocking Mugabe over his reported stumble in New Delhi, where he was attending the India-Africa Summit http://m.voazimbabwe.com/a/zimbabwe-activist-jailed-over-stumble-that-almost-toppled-mugabe/3030292.html
Truth is, Zimbabwe is by no means the only country in the world with such archaic and unreasonable laws which infringe upon free speech. Several others, including Rwanda, Zambia, Cameroon, Thailand, Colombia, Brazil, Turkey, Spain and France have various versions of similar provisions in their laws, with French laws dating back to 1881 having recently been amended in 2000. But of these and other countries, it is Zimbabwe that has attracted the most notoriety through frequent and careless deployment of the laws in the most trivial and bizarre circumstances, the result of which is more ridicule on the presidency and the country.
In an interview with The Herald in February 2015, Terrence Hussein, a senior lawyer who has represented Mugabe in the past, echoed the sentiments of the Chief Justice. Commenting on the use of the presidential insult laws, he said, “sometimes the way people are being charged [under the presidential insult law] is in itself trivialising the office of the President.”
Hussein went further, accurately explaining why prosecution in such trivial matters actually made things worse for the President:
“The NPA should prosecute only the most serious cases and not some of these little things that are said in beerhalls and some such other places. For example, if someone says something in a bar, no one else will know except the people in that bar, so when you go on to prosecute that person you are giving the case prominence and seriousness it did not have in the first placeâ€
This is true. By prosecuting trivial cases involving so-called insults against the President, the prosecution authorities are actually giving a higher profile to matters that would otherwise have remained localised and low-key. It’s like taking legal action for defamation – one of the risks is that it is the legal action that actually gives eminence to the defamatory statements which would otherwise have remained localised, lesser known and therefore, less damaging than if no action had been taken in the first place.
The same can be said of the bizarre case of the University of Zimbabwe’s Deputy Registrar. For 19 years, she has been a loyal and diligent servant of the university in this senior post, coordinating all graduation ceremonies. Then in the 19th year, her boss, the Vice Chancellor, accuses her of giving the Chancellor, President Mugabe, the wrong-sized hat for the graduation ceremony. On that basis he sacks her and hand-picks a disciplinary committee to preside over her case, making a Kangaroo court look more dignified.
19 years of senior service and you go, just because the President supposedly got the wrong-sized cap. 19 years go down the drain all because you are accused of “embarrassing†President Mugabe. A small matter becomes a big bizarre and ridiculous case on the world stage.
Apart from the senior employee who might lose her job, the other person whose reputation gets bruised and soiled is Mugabe. It’s not the Deputy Registrar who is embarrassing Mugabe, but the Vice Chancellor who, by making a mountain out of a molehill and dragging Mugabe’s name through the international media, is creating the scene in which Mugabe is portrayed as a villain. The world will not talk about Nyagura, but it will talk about Mugabe as the man who sacked a public official for merely giving him the wrong hat for a graduation ceremony.
Mugabe might not even know that such cases are being prosecuted in his name. But this is the system that his 35-year rule has created – it consists of a bunch of sycophantic lieutenants who, in their excessive zeal to please him and demonstrate that they are doing a thorough job, will often go overboard, even if it means mistreating other citizens in the process. There is only one person who can stop these bizarre cases and the damage they do to his reputation, and that person is Mugabe himself. These people do all these bizarre and vexatious things in the belief that they are protecting and pleasing him, but he needs to tell them that they are only doing him more damage.
WaMagaisa
This article is exclusive to this website and should not to be reproduced without the express permission of the author: wamagaisa@yahoo.co.uk
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