The Constitutional Court dismissed on Tuesday a bid by three former University of Zimbabwe research workers to recover US$788,296 in unpaid salaries, ruling that the debt was converted to local currency under Statutory Instrument 33 of 2019 and that the workers had failed to show the Supreme Court violated their rights.
Isdore Husahwevu, Walter Mutowo and Fungai Zinyama had asked the apex court for direct access to challenge a Supreme Court judgment that upheld the 1:1 conversion of their judgment debt. Justices Rita Makarau, Anne Mary Gowora and Ben Hlatshwayo refused, with Gowora writing that the application was an appeal in disguise.
A 19-year fight that ends at the apex court
The dispute began in 2007, when the three were dismissed from the UZ-UCSF Collaborative Research Programme. A labour officer's arbitral award ordered their reinstatement and the payment of outstanding salaries and benefits. When the employer failed to reinstate them, they went to court to register and quantify the award.
On May 8, 2014, the High Court Registrar issued a writ of execution for US$788,296.21 owed to the three. The money was never paid in dollars. In October 2020 the programme deposited ZWL788,296.21 into the workers' lawyers' account, which they rejected. A further deposit of ZWL837,710.10 into Mutowo's bank account in March 2022 was also refused.
The employer then sought a High Court declaration that the debt had been discharged at the 1:1 rate. Justice Tagu ruled in its favour in October 2022. Justice Mushure dismissed a later attempt to have the debt declared payable in US dollars, and the Supreme Court upheld that decision in judgment SC 86/25 on June 30, 2025.
Why the court rejected the foreign-currency argument
The workers argued that the research programme was funded from abroad and therefore fell under exemptions in section 44C(2)(b) of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Act, which shields certain foreign obligations from conversion. The court said the argument could not stand because the amount had already become a judgment debt before SI 33/19 took effect.
Citing the earlier Zambezi Gas Zimbabwe (Private) Limited v NR Barber (Private) Limited decision, Gowora held that judgment debts expressed in US dollars immediately before the instrument's effective date were subject to conversion.
Since such debts are classified as financial or contractual obligations, they are, accordingly, captured by the statutory mechanism that converted USD liabilities to RTGS values as from the effective date.
The judges also rejected the claim that the Supreme Court denied the workers a fair hearing by deciding on only one of their eight grounds of appeal. A court may determine a single issue where that issue can dispose of the whole dispute, the judgment said, adding that the Supreme Court had correctly applied res judicata because the currency question had already been settled by the High Court.
The inevitable conclusion is that this is an appeal in disguise.
The defunct programme question
The workers also challenged the continued participation of the research programme in the proceedings, saying it had ceased operations in 2017 and could no longer litigate in its own name. Their lawyer's concession that the programme appeared defunct drew scrutiny from the bench.
An affidavit by its former Grants and Operations Manager, Margaret Mukoki, stated that the programme folded its operations in 2017. The workers pointed to continued funding from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases up to 2021, with six clinical research sites operating under US-sponsored networks.
The court found that the funding did not prove the original programme was still running, because its activities had moved to a new Clinical Trials Unit under the university's College of Health Sciences.
The crucial point at this stage is that there is, in fact, no legal entity currently operating under the name UZ-UCSF Collaborative Research Programme.
The judges said the entity's status did not change the outcome. They found the workers had not shown the Supreme Court's decision was so irrational or arbitrary that it violated their fundamental rights.
They failed dismally in this endeavour.
The application was dismissed without an order for costs. The ruling,