Every paragraph, line, comma and full stop were negotiated and agreed on by the parties and signed by all their negotiators as confirmation that they identify with both the content and process of Constitution-making, yet Zanu (PF) now says the draft constitution is fundamentaly flawed.

SADC and President Jacob Zuma do not need any better evidence than this that Zanu (PF) needs to be hand-held through the whole process to the election, especially now that they have started banning MDC rallies again.

We might say maybe we were naive to have thought that Zanu (PF) would negotiate itself into an election that it is likely to lose, but it was a process that had to be gone through, especially to get SADC on board.

We hope that President Jacob Zuma and incoming SADC chairman Armando Guebuza will make it clear to Zanu (PF) at this week's summit that SADC has tried to give them the distance and the autonomy to resolve the issues internally with the MDC, but clearly this has not been possible - in fact Zanu (PF) has been deceitful.

The negotiation process was extended by more than two months in the latest episode to accommodate Zanu (PF)'s endless revisions, but even after that, and after negotiating every paragraph, line, comma and full stop, as one of the negotiators put it, Zanu (PF) is now still saying it wants to renegotiate five manor aspects of the draft constitution.

This comes at a time when soldiers, CIO's and Zanu (PF) militias have been accused of sabotaging the planned national census which is also a crucial part of getting the data needed for delimitation of constituencies and production of an accurate voter's roll.

The ostensible reason given for disrupting the census preparations was that the security personnel were simply trying to also cash in on the allowances paid to enumerators, but President Zuma should look deeper at this situation.

The way the disruptions were co-ordinated all over the country, and the fact that despite the clearly dangerous lack of discipline shown by the security personnel, the Zimbabwe Defense Forces Commander General Constantine Chiwenga has not mentioned anything about disciplining anyone.

In fact he defended them saying that they were already subordinated to civilian political authority since their liberation war days and were disciplined. If he is to be believed then the only conclusion that Mr Zuma and SADC should reach is that the disruption was actually orchestrated by the Zanu (PF) civilian authorities.

Gen Chiwenga was quoted in a major PR exercise for the ZDF saying his soldiers adhered to the principle of military subordination to civilian authority since the struggle, that they were improving their standards through National Defence College and that they showed professionalism, and he defended the ZDF's involvement in commercial activity, like diamond mining, saying it was common all over the world.

The interview with Chiwenga did not go into the lack of transparency in the diamond mining, where the companies involved in diamond mining are said to be registered in off-shore tax havens where the real ownership cannot be ascertained and the Minister of Finance Tendai Biti has said he does not know about their operations, nor is he receiving revenue from them. He even said the military's recruitment is illegal as it did not go through his ministry.

Instead it is suspected that the proceeds from the military operations are being used to fund the Zanu (PF) campaign or to secretly pay agents and the soldiers who are being recruited are part of extending the intimidation machinary of Zanu (PF) which has never been dismantled.

Zanu (PF)'s publicly available propaganda by Nathaniel Manheru in the stateme media - itself an outstanding issue of the GPA - is clear that Zanu (PF) rules. What Manheru does not say is that it does not rule with the consent of the people. So President Zuma should also be aware of the very public stance taken by the Zanu (PF)-supporting national media, which does not even attempt to hide what Zanu (PF) is doing.

In his Saturday Herald column Manheru delights in telling us that Zanu (PF) rules, that the relationship between MDC and Zanu (PF) in the Copac process is between rulers and the governed. His colleague Jonathan Moyo also writes publicly about sovereignity and about wanting President Jacob Zuma to leave Zimbabweans alone to resolve their problems, yet President Zuma and the SADC came on board because it was clear that the Zimbabwean parties could not solve their problems internally.

President Zuma has shown his diplomatic mettle and not said anything in support of or against any of the parties in the GPA, but it is now time for him to show that diplomatic gloves can also be taken off. President Mugabe must be told in no uncertain terms that he lost the 2008 election and is only ruling under the GPA, and that any violation of the GPA invalidates his rule.

The Maputo Summit will be the eighth summit to be held while the Zimbabwean GNU issue is still on its books. At many of the summits Zanu (PF) has lobbied for Zimbabwe not to be discussed, and it was not, but now it can no longer be ignored, as the clock is ticking to the end of the Global Political Agreement and the end of the current Parliament  - a situation which Zanu (PF) has already said it intends to use to return the country to the rejected 1979 Constitution - the same constitution that was used by Zanu (PF) to run elections that were rejected by the AU.

It is now time for SADC to wake up and smell the coffee, that it is dealing with the sophisticated regime that is playing off African leaders against each other.