MNANGAGWA REMOVED JESSIE MAJOME BECAUSE SHE TOLD THE TRUTH AND ZANU PF CANNOT SURVIVE THE TRUTH

The reasons being offered for the removal of Jessie Majome from the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission insult the intelligence of every Zimbabwean. We are told there was no quorum when she issued her report. We are told she failed to consult. We are told she commented on an unfinished process. We are told she should have taken her findings to parliament before the media. Four neat little excuses, lined up in a row like a parade of straw men, all of them designed to obscure the one fact that actually matters. Majome saw what was happening at the public hearings on Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 3, she said it out loud, and ZANU PF could not allow her to remain in office one day longer.

Let us deal with the excuses on their own terms before we expose them for what they are.

The quorum complaint is the most cynical. The ZHRC was operating with the membership it had at the time, the very membership the appointing authority itself had been content to leave in place. If the regime was so troubled by quorum, the obvious question is why it took so long to make new appointments to a constitutional body it is now using as a weapon against its own former chairperson. The commission produced its report under the conditions the regime created. That is not Majome’s failing. That is the regime’s design.

The claim that she failed to consult is equally hollow. Consult whom exactly? The ruling party whose hearings she was investigating? The ministers whose process she was monitoring? An independent commission does not seek permission from the people it oversees before it tells the truth about them. That is precisely why it is called independent.

The objection that she commented on an unfinished process collapses the moment one looks at the calendar. The hearings had already taken place. The intimidation had already happened. Citizens had been screened at the doors by men holding whips. Opposition voices had been denied entry to venues deliberately too small to accommodate them. The damage was already done. If a human rights body must wait for a regime to finish trampling on rights before it can speak, then it is not a watchdog. It is a mortuary attendant.

The fourth excuse, that she went to the media before parliament, is the most revealing of all. Yes, the constitution provides that annual reports be submitted to parliament through the Minister of Justice. But the ZHRC also has the explicit power to monitor, investigate, hold public hearings and issue statements. A statement issued in the immediate aftermath of nationwide consultations on a constitutional theft is not an annual report. It is the constitutional watchdog doing the constitutional job. Forcing such findings to first travel through a captured ministry and a captured parliament is a prescription for silence. Which is, of course, the entire point.

Strip away the four excuses and the truth stands naked. Majome was removed because her report was accurate. The hearings were violent. Opposition voices were excluded. The exercise was a sham designed to manufacture the illusion of public consent for an amendment whose outcome had already been decided in cabinet. She named that reality. ZANU PF cannot tolerate it being named.

Even the method of her removal exposes the regime. The constitution does not allow the President to dismiss a member of an independent commission by simply reassigning her. It requires a tribunal under Section 237. None was convened. The order was issued, the deed was done, and the lawyers were left to argue with a fait accompli. A regime that cannot follow the constitution to remove a single commissioner is the same regime now demanding our trust to rewrite that constitution from top to bottom.

Jessie Majome did her job. That is why she lost it. The institutions ZANU PF cannot capture, it dismantles.