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While even a perusal of the draft immediately dis­closes the dark cloud over Copac, the availability of the draft to Zimbabweans through its publication today is a most welcome silver lining because it gives the nation and neutral observers an informed basis from which to independently assess the self-evidently flawed Copac draft that has been falsely produced in the name of the people.
Even more important, the publication of the official Copac draft constitution today should particularly enable the GPA principals to call an end to the Copac charade. Copac has become a national disaster that must not be allowed to continue. Enough should be enough. In the circumstances, two things have become necessary. 
First, there’s now a clear and present case for delink­ing the constitution making process from the GPA process in general and from the election roadmap in particular. Elections must be held this year without fail because they are now long overdue in terms of the cur­rent constitution which has been amended for that pur­pose.
While the question of whether Zimbabwe needs a new constitution has not been factually established by Copac after its fatal failure to publish the national report with the views of the people, independent assessments of those views have indicated beyond dis­putation that at least 80 percent of them support the current constitution.
With this in mind, and in the national interest, the GPA principals should be responsible and honest enough to understand, and they must have the courage to tell the nation and anybody else interested in the matter, that there’s never been any necessary link between the Copac process and the next elections besides cheap political wishes and cheap propaganda of some vested interests populated by electoral cowards. 
The time for that propaganda is up. People and their interests must come first.
Second, the GPA principals should seriously con­sider setting up a commission of enquiry into what has gone so terribly wrong in and with Copac and why and for that enquiry to advise the GPA principals on how best to rescue the Copac mess in order to move the constitution-making process forward through a legally defined and strictly home-grown process led by suit­ably qualified and experienced compatriots and under the auspices of a nationally representative legal struc­ture which is not controlled by any political party and which has a legally defined time frame.
l The facts are no longer debatable that after being given the benefit of doubt for more than 36 months the Copac process has terribly failed the nation not only by wasting time, taking forever, while squandering resources whose budget is now said to be well over US$45 million only to produce an insulting and terri­bly defective draft constitution which has all the evil trappings of regime change that Zimbabweans have resolutely resisted since 1998.
l Anyone reading the draft which is now in the pub­lic domain will immediately realise that what is wrong about it is not just that it is a despicable regime change pamphlet so full of politics that it does not deserve to be called a draft constitution. What is worse and most damaging and therefore totally unacceptable is that the Copac draft constitution does not reflect or represent the views of the people as gathered during the Copac outreach programme. 
Indeed, the Copac claims that the views of the people have been included are plain false and cannot be vali­dated by any objective third party validation process. The Copac case is not helped by the fact that Copac failed to publish the views of the people prior to com­mencing the drafting exercise, which is why a commis­sion of enquiry has become necessary to establish why the people have been cheated in such a big way against their views. 
In any event there is now incontrovertible empirical evidence that the critical Chapters One to Five of the draft were in fact drafted well before the Select Com­mittee as a whole had seen let alone approved any drafting instructions.
What this means is that Copac has not only wasted US$45 million which is yet to be audited but that it has also produced a false and scandalous draft constitution that does not contain the views of the people.
The views of the people have been arrogantly tram­pled upon and all of this has been done without the sanction of the Select Committee because the Copac co-Chairs have constituted themselves into an unac­countable political forum that has given its self a false mandate to negotiate a constitution that was supposed to be people-driven.
The evidence for this is now formidable and would speak volumes should it be given to a neutral commis­sion of enquiry which is now inevitable one way or the other formally or informally. To understand what has happened in Copac or why what was supposed to be constitutional has become political, consider the fol­lowing questions.
Do you remember the cacophonic political noise that the MDC-T kept making only to stop when the Copac drafting started? The noise was about what the MDC-T claimed were some 29 outstanding GPA issues. And do you remember the equally cacophonic media noise from president Zuma’s facilitation team led by Lindiwe Zulu made throughout 2011 about the so-called Sadc election roadmap for Zimbabwe and do you remember how that roadmap was reported with monotonous regularity and absolute urgency by some sections of the media that support the MDC-T?
In the same vein do you remember the vociferous and incessant media calls by some ambassadors of countries in the white world who were falling on each other almost every day to call for “the full and total” implementation of the GPA?
Related to that do you remember the US Ambas­sador Charles Ray boldly declaring in July 2011 during an address to the Bulawayo Press Club that regime change in Zimbabwe should not just be about changing the roof at the top by only removing President Mugabe from power even through an election but that it should be fundamentally be about building a new foundation of the house of Zimbabwe through constitution-mak­ing?
It is very instructive that there’s now a deafening silence from the MDC-T about its 29 outstanding GPA issues and an equally deafening silence from not only president Zuma’s Lindiwe Zulu about Sadc’s electoral roadmap for Zimbabwe but also from those ambassa­dors of the white world who are no longer making noise about their demands for the “total and full” implementation of the GPA but who are now saying they are supporting constitution-making through the UNDP and who are now demanding that there must be a new constitution before the next elections.
If you want to know the strategic thinking behind this deafening silence about the so-called 29 outstand­ing GPA issues, or demands for full implementation of the GPA, then you should recall how the South African Minister of International Relations and Co-operation, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, speaking in her country’s parliament in March in reply to an apparently planted question raised eyebrows and triggered national secu­rity alarm bells in Zimbabwe when she was widely quoted in the media as falsely alleging that, “the GPA envisages that an election in Zimbabwe will only be held following the finalisation of the constitution-mak­ing process . . . a committee is drafting a new constitu­tion, after which a referendum and then elections should be held. Our (the South African) government therefore expects that there would be no deviation from the provisions of the GPA”.
It is clear from what Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said in March that the reason for the deafening silence is because all the regime change focus, all the GPA efforts and the resources about outstanding issues and their implementation have dramatically if not conveniently coalesced around Copac which is now expected to deliver all the media reforms, security sector reforms, judiciary and rule of law reforms Reserve Bank reforms, Attorney General’s office reforms and every­thing else that the Inclusive Government has been unable to deliver through other GPA structures such as the Cabinet, the Forum of Negotiators, the Forum of Principals, Parliament and Jomic.
Copac has thus been corrupted and turned into a GPA negotiation forum as the last GPA battleground before the next harmonised presidential, parliamentary and local government elections.
Some in the MDC-T such as the party’s national organising secretary Nelson Chamisa have been so excited about this prospect that they have been telling anyone happy to listen something to the effect that that “while Zanu-PF dribbled us during the Copac outreach process we have dribbled them during the constitution drafting process. We will use the new constitution to grab power and do a better and proper constitution alone when we are in power”.
Surely this is unacceptable. For Copac to ignore the views of the people is not to dribble Zanu-PF but to dribble the people themselves. And this is why Copac has become a tragedy.
How this has happened and who has done what in the process and the implications of all that on the national interest and national security should form part of what should be unravelled by a commission of enquiry into Copac along with the design of a more appropriate way forward in the making of a constitu­tion that Zimbabweans deserve.

The writer is a professor of political science, MP for Tsholotsho North, Zanu-PF Politburo member and former minister of Media, Information and Publicity.