Tendai Biti calls for closure of Zimbabwean Courts… Says Chiefs and Headmen better than magistrates

In sentiments poised at raising the ire of authorities in the judicial sector, outspoken opposition MDC Alliance figure Tendai Biti has poured scorn at the country’s courts of justice, saying it was better to shut down all the courts and revert back to the archaic and traditional forms of justice where village headmen and chiefs presided over all matters of judicial importance.

Biti, who is a practising lawyer himself, said the current state of the country’s courts made him ‘so embarrassed to be an officer of the law’.

“I have proudly practiced law for many years but the things I see in courts these days make me so embarrassed to be an officer of the law . We should close all courts and go back to chiefs and headman . At least they are consistent,” said Biti in a tweet.

His sentiments come at a time when Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s Government has come under heavy criticism amid allegations that the executive has since ‘captured’ the judiciary which now panders to the whims of those in positions of political authority at the expense of the oppositional establishment.

On March 31 this year, the Nelson Chamisa-led MDC Alliance accused Harare of having a hand in the shock Supreme Court ruling which declared Thokozani Khupe the linterim leader of the opposition, pending an extraordinary congress to choose the substantive replacement to the late founding MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai.

When Tsvangirai finally lost his battle with colon cancer at a South African medical facility on Valentine’s Day in 2018, his party was involved in vicious succession fights with Chamisa and Khupe taking every turn to embarrass each other at Tsvangirai’s funeral wake in his native Buhera.

Zwnews