2 - ‘Rebels’ and ‘Good Boys’

Summary

Chapter 2 demonstrates how, after 2000, ZANU-PF extended its political control over the judiciary by staffing its institutions with political appointees. Within the attorney general’s office, such political interference ran from the attorney general himself down to prosecutors working on ZANU-PF’s ‘instructions’. It argues, however, that when we look at the working conditions in the Attorney General’s office more closely, the fragmented hegemony of law within the Zimbabwean state becomes evident. ZANU-PF-instructed prosecutors – the ‘good boys’ – who were willing to set aside their professional conduct to toe the party political line, sat side by side with ‘rebel’ prosecutors, individuals who conducted themselves impartially and did their job ‘professionally’ in an effort to safeguard ‘substantive justice’. In its attempts to exert political control over the attorney general’s office, the ZANU-PF-led government had to contend with historical debates over state professionalism, which rooted law’s legitimacy in legal institutions’ capacity to deliver justice, and tied state authority to the protection of this capacity. In their performances, ‘rebel’ prosecutors positioned themselves as actors within a wider community of judicial officials, human rights lawyers, activists and citizens that shared this consciousness of the value of professionalism.