Amendment Bill does not trigger referendum requirement: Prof Moyo

There is no constitutional requirement for a referendum on the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment Bill (No. 3), 2026, Professor Jonathan Moyo has said, arguing that the proposed reforms are aimed at strengthening institutions rather than benefiting individuals. The political scientist said the debate has been clouded by what he described as a misunderstanding of constitutional terminology, particularly the distinction between term limits and election cycles.

“At the centre of this debate are claims that amending a term-limit provision necessarily triggers a referendum. This is false, in my respectful opinion,” he said during CITE’s X Space discussion on Thursday. The Bill proposes, among other changes, extending the national electoral cycle from five to seven years and introducing the indirect election of the president through Parliament.

However, Prof Moyo rejected interpretations of Section 328(7) suggesting that any change affecting presidential tenure requires a referendum, especially if it benefits an incumbent. “The Constitution mandates referendums only for amendments to Chapters 4 and 16 and to Section 328 itself,” he said. “There is not even one term-limit provision that falls under these parts of the Constitution.” He said the Constitution contains 15 term-limit provisions and insisted that none of them is amended by the current Bill.

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“Section 328(7) comes into play only if there is an amendment to a term-limit provision, not any other provision,” he said. Prof Moyo argued that confusion has arisen from conflating provisions that deal generally with time and those that impose a fixed cap on tenure. “If a provision talks about time but does not place a cap on it, then it is not a term-limit provision,” he said.

Referring to the Constitutional Court judgment in Max Mupungu v Minister of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs and Others, he noted that the court distinguished between a “term”, defined as a fixed or limited period, and a “period”, which is simply a length of time. “For a clause to qualify as a term-limit provision under Section 328(1), it must limit the length of time that a person may hold office,” he said. “All term-limit provisions guarantee specific ends; they are not open-ended or elastic.”

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