Basic Facts
Basic Facts
Full name: Republic of Zimbabwe
Location: Landlocked in Southern Africa bordered by Zambia in the north, South Africa in the south, Mozambique in the east and Botswana in the west.
Geographic coordinates: 20 00 S, 30 00 E
Population: 12 523 000 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs – Population Division estimate, 2009)
Capital city: Harare 17°50′S 31°3′E
Major towns and estimated populations:
Major languages: English, Shona, and Ndebele (official and national).
Literacy: 89.4% can read and write.
Area: 390 757 sq km
Land: 386 670 sq km
Water: 3910 sq km (1 percent)
Land Boundaries: 3 066 km
Border Countries: Botswana 813 km; Mozambique 1231 km; South Africa 225 km; Zambia 797 km
Highest Point: Mt Inyangani (2,592 metres.) along the eastern border with Mozambique
Lowest Point: junction of the Runde and Save rivers 162 m.
Monetary unit: Zimbabwe dollar (ZWD) the hyperinflation of recent years has led the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to periodically re-denominate the dollar, removing zeros
Independence: 18 April 1980
Constitution: December 1979; amended 19 times since 1980.
National Holidays: Independence Day (18 April); Workers’ Day (1 May); Africa Day (25 May); Heroes Day (Second Monday of August); Defence Forces Day (Second Tuesday of August); Unity Day (22 December); and all major Christian holidays such as Easter and Christmas.
Flag Description: seven equal horizontal bands of green, yellow, red, black, red, yellow, and green with a white isosceles triangle edged in black with its base on the hoist side; a yellow Zimbabwe bird is superimposed on a red five-pointed star in the center of the triangle. White symbolizes peace; green symbolizes agriculture, yellow - mineral wealth, red - blood shed to achieve independence, and black stands for the native people.
Suffrage: 18 years of age; universal
Life Expectancy: 35,5 years; 37 for males; 34 for females (WHO, 2006)
Time Zone: GMT +2 hours
International Dialling Code: 263
Internet domain: .zw
Head of State: Robert Mugabe (Prime Minister from 18 April 1980 – 1987, President 31 December 1987 to date)
First Deputy President: Joseph Msika (deceased) (December 1999 – August 2009)
Second Deputy President: Joice Mujuru (since 6 December 2004)
Prime Minister: Morgan Tsvangirai (since 11 February 2009)
Deputy Prime Minister: Thokozani Khupe (since 11 February 2009)
Deputy Prime Minister: Arthur Mutambara (since 11 February 2009)
Government Structure
Zimbabwe is a semi-presidential consociationalist republic. The executive consists of the President and his two deputies. The head of government is the Prime Minister who also has two deputies. Zimbabwe has a bicameral Parliament consisting of the upper house Senate with 93 seats and the lower House of Assembly with 210 seats. According to the power-sharing agreement of 15 September 2008, the President is the head of the Cabinet, while the Prime Minister heads the Council of Ministers.
Prior to the reintroduction of the office of Prime Minister, Zimbabwe was in practice a guided democracy in which the president wielded the executive power, as he was both the chief of state and head of government. The President remains the Commander-in-Chief of the Defence Forces.
The President is directly elected by an absolute majority. The president is elected by direct vote and, until the 19th Constitutional Amendment that paved way for a power-sharing arrangement, the president could hold office for six years. Like in the British Westminster system, from which Zimbabwe’s constitution heavily borrows, there is no limit on the number of presidential terms. The term during which a party can control the government is five years. Presidential candidates are nominated via a nomination paper signed by at least 10 registered voters (at least one from each province) and elected by popular vote for a six-year term. The last presidential election was held on 29 March 2008, with a run-off election on 27 June 2008.
Representative structures consist of a House of Assembly and a cabinet appointed by the president. Eight chiefs, traditional representatives elected by their peers, also sit in the House of Assembly. At rural district levels, there are elected councils. Each district is made up of a number of wards, and wards are subdivided into villages. Alongside the representative structure are the civil service (the administrative structure), the police, the military, permanent secretaries and other ministry staff, and provincial and district administration staff.
Legislature
The legislature comprises a bicameral Parliament, the House of Assembly and the Senate.
The House of Assembly of Zimbabwe is the lower chamber of the country`s bicameral Parliament. It consists of 210 members, all of whom must be elected into office from the constituencies by universal adult suffrage.
The upper house of parliament is the Senate, which was reintroduced in 2005 after being scrapped in 1987, consists of 93 members. Of the 93, 60 are elected into office, while the president appoints 33. The Senate consists of six Senators from each province directly elected by voters registered in the 60 Senate constituencies; 10 Provincial Governors appointed by the President; the president and deputy president of Council of Chiefs; 16 chiefs, being two chiefs from each province other than metropolitan provinces, and five Senators appointed by the President. The term of the Senate is 5 years.
Judiciary
The Judiciary comprises a Supreme Court, High Court, Magistrate Court, Administrative Courts and Local and Customary Law Courts, which are presided by chiefs and headmen and deal primarily with customary law. The Chief Justice, who is directly appointed by the President, heads the judiciary. In theory, the judiciary should provide for checks and balances in the exercise of power between the Executive and the Legislature. It is established by an Act of Parliament and there are constitutional provisions guaranteeing its independence from the executive. Under the constitution of Zimbabwe, the appointment and dismissal of senior members of the judiciary is to be carried out through the Judicial Services Commission (comprising the Chief Justice, the Chairman of the Public Services Commission, the Attorney General and two to three members of the public appointed by the President), in consultation with the Executive and the Legislature. In practice, the appointment system has not been transparent, and the Executive has had a more direct influence in the appointment of not only the Chief Justice, but also Supreme Court and High Court Judges. In the last few years, the Executive has increasingly interfered with the judiciary system and judges have been pressured to make rulings favourable to government and ruling party officials (Saki and Chiware, 2007)
Political Parties
The two main political parties at the moment are the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), founded in 1963 and led by Robert Gabriel MUGABE who took over the reins from the founding President Ndabaningi Sithole in 1975, and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), formed in September 1999 under the leadership of the former trade unionist Morgan Richard TSVANGIRAI. The MDC is now split into two factions – one led by TSVANGIRAI and the faction led by Arthur MUTAMBARA. Both factions of the MDC are represented in parliament.
The other registered, small parties in the country, none of whom hold seats in parliament, are: United People`s Party, founded in June 2006 and led by the former ZANU PF provincial chairman of Masvingo who was expelled from the party in 2004, Daniel SHUMBA; Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), led by Agrippa MADLELA and other former ZAPU leaders who refused to move into ZANU PF after the political merger between ZANU and ZAPU in 1987; Zimbabwe African National Union-Ndonga (ZANU-Ndonga) under Wilson KUMBULA who took over the reins of the party after the death of Ndabaningi Sithole in 2000. Other small parties include Zimbabwe Youth in Alliance (ZIYA) which came onto the political scene in 2005; Zimbabwe Union of Democrats (ZUD), founded by Margaret DONGO in 1998 after her expulsion from ZANU PF in 1995; the United Parties (UP), led by the former Prime Minister of the short-lived Zimbabwe-Rhodesia government, Abel MUZOREWA; and the Zimbabwe Integrated Party (ZIP), founded by academic and university professor Heneri Dzinotyiweyi in 1996. ZUD, UP and ZIP have actually become inactive since the 2000 election (Eisa, 2007; Eisa, 2005).
Human Rights Practice
Zimbabwe has had a controversial human rights history, punctuated by state violence and oppression dating back to the colonial period when the white minority state denied hundreds of thousands of blacks basic human rights, violated and degraded their humanity through violence and economic dispossession. Since taking over at independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean state has not effectively dismantled or reformed colonial institutions of oppression and violence against subjects. In certain instances, it has actually bolstered such instruments and Zimbabweans have continued to suffer from the effects of state authoritarianism inherited from the Rhodesian state and perpetuated by the Zimbabwe state.
Some of the major human rights violations committed by the government in the 1980s and 1990s included killings of civilians that occurred during the Gukurahundi period in the early 1980s. The massive deployment of state violence during the Gukurahundi conflict in Matebeleland and Midlands (1982-1987) led to the loss of more than 20 000 civilian lives. Government suppression of student and labour protests increased in the late 1980s and early 1990s as people began to protest against suffering brought about by a slowdown in the economy, increased landlessness and the negative impact of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank-funded Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes (ESAP) (Ndlovu_Gatsheni, 2003; Raftopoulos & Sachikonye, 2001; Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, 1997.)
Zimbabwe’s human rights image has taken a knocking since the beginning of the Fast Track Land Resettlement Programme initiated towards the end of 1999 and the controversial 2000 parliamentary and March 2002 presidential elections, which were preceded by months of violence and political intimidation against political opponents. Most observers condemned the 2002 election as seriously flawed, but SADC and the African Union endorsed the process (Zimbabwe Election Support Network, 2002; SA Observer Mission, 2002; SADC Parliamentary Forum, 2002; Commonwealth Observer Mission, 2002; US Embassy, 2002; Norwegian Election Observer Mission, 2002).Western governments reacted by imposing travel restrictions against senior Zimbabwean officials and placing embargoes on the sale of arms to Zimbabwe. The United States (US) and the European Union also froze the financial assets of selected ruling party officials. The Zimbabwe Democracy Act imposed by the US directly and effectively denies Zimbabwe access to external multilateral financial support (Hondora, 2006; Moyo, 2006; Magaisa, 2006; Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, 2001).
In May 2005, the government began Operation Murambatsvina (also known as Operation Restore Order), ostensibly to rid urban areas of illegal structures, illegal business enterprises, and criminal activities. The operation, which resulted in at least 700 000 people losing their homes and belongings, was widely condemned by local and international human rights groups, churches, the United Nations (UN) and western governments such as Britain and the US. (UN, 2005; Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, 2005)
Over the past seven years, the government has passed legislation restricting free movement, free speech and rights of assembly, such as the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). The government has launched a clampdown on independent journalists, several of whom have subsequently been arrested and abducted. There has also been a general militarization of society, with heavy military deployment in both rural and urban areas, particularly during election periods. The military has become involved in food distribution and elections monitoring, especially prior to presidential elections. This militarization has contributed to deteriorating human rights conditions in the country, as has the increasing impunity demonstrated by the state’s response to non-state actors like the youth militia and war veterans. (Kagoro, 2003; Solidarity Peace Trust, 2006)
Since the beginning of the land reform process and the 2002 presidential election, the political climate has remained tense and intensely polarized. Intra-party violence has sporadically occurred, especially during elections, and opposition supporters have complained of intimidation and harassment. In 2008, in the weeks immediately following the contested March elections, there were reports of systematic violence targeting the opposition. Reports continued throughout the year and activists were summarily detained. In December 2008, journalist turned human rights activist Jestina Mukoko was abducted by security forces from her home and sent to Chikurubi Maximum security prison on allegations of attempting to oust the ZANU-PF government. She was released a few weeks after Tsvangirai was inaugurated as the country’s Prime Minister. There has, however, been a notable decline in political violence since the power-sharing government came into being on 11 February 2009. Political and human rights activists that had been detained have since been released on bail.
