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Cde Sibanda who was making a presentation at the invitation of the Zimbabwe Congress of Students Unions at Gweru Polytechnic yesterday said the all-stakeholders conference to discuss the draft constitution was a mere waste of time and resources as Zimbabweans would reject the document, which does not reflect their views.

“There are questions in the name Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) itself because the two formations claim to be a movement towards democracy but whose democracy? There is no specification on whether it’s a Zimbabwe movement or not but we have since realised from this Constitution Select Committee animal that the two formations are not pushing a Zimbabwean democracy after they teamed up and decided to alter the people’s views as is reflected by the draft constitution. They forged a war against Zimbabwean democracy, which Zanu-PF was for and came up with views which serve the interests of their masters. Zimbabweans should reject that,” he said.

Cde Sibanda said there were glaring irregularities in the Copac process, which culminated in the draft constitution.

He said the draft constitution does not contain the people’s views. Cde Sibanda said in areas of disagreement, the Copac team was referring back the sticking points to principals to the Global Political Agreement (GPA) instead of going back to the people.

“In areas where the Copac team would have disagreed they would consult the three principals and reach a compromise as if the principals were the general populace. They were supposed to revert back to the data collected from the people instead of approaching the principals. That alone made the draft constitution a misrepresentation of the people’s views,” he said.

Cde Sibanda said the draft constitution was compiled using the qualitative form when the people’s views were gathered in a quantitative manner.

“They (Copac team) are the ones who drafted the questionnaire, the ones who designed the venues and the whole process was quantitative only for them to then renege and implement the qualitative approach to come up with their Copac draft constitution,” he said.

The war veterans’ leader said rejecting the Copac draft constitution was the only means to peacefully defend the country’s integrity.

He said adopting the draft constitution, which he attacked for promoting same sex marriages, would be tantamount to surrendering the country’s hard-won independence to the former colonisers.

Cde Sibanda said the West, which was sponsoring the two MDC formations, were the major sponsors of the Copac outreach programmes.

He said the West was now putting pressure on the two political parties to influence the outcome of the final constitution so as to serve its interests.

“MDC formations and their Western sponsors succeeded in coming up with a flawed draft constitution but as Zimbabweans, the first and last peaceful means to defend our sovereignty is to reject the draft constitution,” said Cde Sibanda.