Of Zimbabwe and the Legal System

Hello everybody. I hope I find you well and in perfect health as we approach the festive season. This new site is great and promise you the best in terms of our laws and how they affect your interests and day to day livelihood.

To start with, it is important to give a background to our legal system by looking at the highest legal authority: our Constitution. The Zimbabwe Constitution was negotiated at Lancaster House in 1979. This constitution has been applicable to date, with some amendments that have been made by our parliament from time to time.

The constitution forms a anchorage of all legal issues relating to our country. Below the Constitution are statutes that have been passed by our Legislature. These laws relate to issued that affect the country and citizens, and determines how our country is governed. They are simple statutes like the Water Act, Deeds Act, Magistrate Court Act, Public Order and Security Act and hundreds of other statutes that govern our society.

Below the statues are by laws and regulations that are passed by City Councils, Rural District Councils and other local authorities. All these affect the way society is managed, governed, regulated and administered daily.

In this column we will be looking at socio-legal issues relating to specific laws that affect our lives at a more personal level in relation to our families, businesses, communities, churches and even the smallest issue of signing an affidavis.

Our laws are broad and cover various areas like divorce, company registrations, management of deceased estates, marriage, contracts of sale, the environment, companies, criminal activities, the constitution, transfer of property and many other scopes and dimensions of the law.

In future articles we will attempt to tackle all these laws and narrow them to specific situations that people find themselves in and wish to extricate themselves from. Examples are: How does one purchase property in Zimbabwe when in the diaspora? How does one open a Transnational company? How does one register the property bequeathed to them by their deceased relatives? All these questions are going to be answered among others that people will be raising through e-mail ( zimeye@googlemail.com). So friends lets keep those e-mails flowing so that we make this column as helpful and beneficial to all of us as much as possible.

Remember legal issues are not as complex and beyond reach as most people think. As you’ll realize through this column, most issues are easily comprehensible and as relevant to us as possible.