By Veritas
For well over a year the President has been urged by some sections of his party to stand for a third term in office after his current term expires in 2028.
The calls for him to remain in office culminated in a resolution at the party’s recent national conference in Mutare that the President’s term should be extended by two years to 2030, and that:
“The party and government are therefore directed to initiate the requisite legislative amendments to give full effect to this resolution to ensure continuity, stability and the sustained transformation of the nation.”
In this bulletin, we shall examine what constitutional changes would have to take place for the President to be allowed to serve after 2028.
Would a Constitutional Amendment be Necessary?
The first point to make is that the Constitution would need to be amended before the President’s current term could be extended or the President could be allowed to serve another term in office.
According to section 91(2) of the Constitution:
“A person is disqualified for election as President or appointment as Vice-President if he or she has already held office as President for two terms, whether continuous or not, and for the purpose of this subsection three or more years’ service is deemed to be a full term.”
By the time of the next general election in 2028, President Mnangagwa will have served two full terms in office, so he will not be eligible to stand for election as President or Vice-President. Hence, as we have said, the Constitution would have to be amended if he is to be allowed to do so.
One lawyer has suggested that the Presidential term might be extended from five years to seven years to enable Mr Mnangagwa to serve until 2030, but once again the Constitution would have to be amended to achieve this because section 95(1) fixes length of the President’s term of office at five years.
So whichever device is used to allow the President to remain in office, a constitutional amendment would be necessary. Which provisions of the Constitution would need to be amended?
Amendment of Section 91
The first and most obvious amendment would be to section 91, which as we have seen sets out the current presidential term-limit. The amendment would entail repealing section 91(2) (if it is decided to scrap presidential term-limits altogether) or changing the words “two terms” to “three terms”, “four terms” or however many terms a President will be allowed to serve (if it is decided to extend the number of terms rather than scrap the limits completely).
Amendment of section 95
If it is decided to lengthen the presidential term from five to seven years, then section 95(1) of the Constitution would have to be amended, because it provides that the length of the President’s term of office is:
“five years and coterminous with the life of Parliament”.
The words “five years” would need to be changed to “seven years” and the words “coterminous with the life of Parliament would have to be deleted unless the life of Parliament is also to be extended to seven years.
An extension of the life of Parliament would involve further constitutional amendments, this time to sections 143(1) and 158(1), which fix the life of Parliament at five years.
The steps needed to amend these section – i.e. sections 91, 95, 143 and 158 – are set out in section 328 of the Constitution:
*The Speaker must publish “the precise terms” of the proposed amendment in the Gazette, and the amendment cannot be introduced in Parliament until 90 days after that publication [section 328(3)].
*The staff of Parliament must immediately invite the public to comment on the proposed amendment, through written submissions and public hearings convened by Parliament [section 328(4)].
In practice these hearings are convened by the Portfolio Committee on Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, and written submissions from the public are sent to that Committee.