By Anna Chibamu
THE Zimbabwe Independent Complaints Commission (ZICC), chaired by Justice Webster Chinamora, is now operational and has so far received 15 grievances.
The ZICC is a five-member commission with the mandate to address citizen complaints against misconduct by security services – the police, army, the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services (ZPCS) and the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO).
Justice Chinamora paid a courtesy call to the Speaker Jacob Mudenda this Tuesday and told journalists that the Commission had started receiving complaints, mostly of an assault nature.
“Since our appointment to the Commission, we have not paid a visit to the Speaker of Parliament. It would have been a release for us not to make that visit because we are aware that Parliament is where it started. Parliament is where the Constitution was made and where that provision, Section 210 of the Constitution, was created, which enables us as the Commission to investigate cases of misconduct or violations of the Constitution by members of the security services, that is the Army, the CIO, the prison service and the police.
“It’s mainly cases of assaults by police officers and allegations of abuse of our office, and those are the main cases, and also delays in handling of our cases when reports are made to the police about violations,” Chinamora said.
Chinamora also highlighted that the Commission had received tremendous support from the President in the form of offices being sequenced to it from the Office of the President and Cabinet and support from the Public Service Commission (PSC).
“We are also informing the Speaker that we have made a draft of the regulations which set out the procedure for receiving complaints, investigating complaints and ending the hearings when they do come to us. So, we are telling them that we did our own draft as a Commission, and we presented it to the Attorney General, and the drafters are now working on it, so that the draft crystallises into a statutory instrument.
“We also got support from the Speaker himself, with very invaluable suggestions that we have a retreat with senior officers for the top brass of the Security Services, so that we build that trust which is required, and that will help us in terms of preventing the actual making of complaints if the top brass knows how to avoid cases of misconduct, how to avoid mistakes which generate the mistakes.”