Many of us have been excluded from the COPAC consultations, by hook or by crook. How many of us found that COPAC’s meetings in our area were disrupted by violence, drowned in shouting or conducted at breakneck speed, which allowed no time for discussion because the questioners were afraid the thugs would catch up with them?
Zanu (PF) has been bullying the other parties and trying to wear them down by refusing to abandon their pet positions, even after apparently agreeing to compromise. These efforts have not been so successful.
A lot of the people we hear debating have learned nothing from the history of constitution writing in this or other countries, so special interest groups, who include NGOs as well as political parties, are trying to put things into the constitution that should not be there.
If we are not careful, we will be rushed to a referendum as soon as Parliament has reviewed the draft (even though they wrote it) and it is put to a so-called “All stakeholders conference”, which means everyone except the common people; that is to say, the 2,000 people who think they know best because they have got themselves comfortable jobs with fat expense accounts in government or NGOs.
We may find that all we can do is vote for or against their document, without a chance to read its full 160 pages. If you will bear with me, I will try to offer over the next few weeks, some points to reflect on, based on my reading of the draft. If my efforts provoke more discussion, I will feel rewarded.
The constitution, as our supreme law, binding on us all (as the introduction to the draft says), must lay down the lasting principles by which government, even parliamentarians, should be ruled as clearly and simply as possible so that we can all understand it. It should not need a lot of amending as time goes on. Principles do not change. How they are applied in changing situations does change.
It would be really bad if articles appeared in the constitution that were designed to prevent someone we could all name from holding or losing power, or to favour one particular party, whichever it is, in the next election. We saw that done in 2000, and in some colonial constitutions. That way leads us to a constitution that soon gets panel-beaten into something we would not recognise.
After that introduction, let’s go to the text, which consists of a preamble (just rhetoric to make us feel good) and 18 chapters. The preamble tries to please everyone; democrats and war veterans, feminists and environmentalists etc. I won’t argue with it.
The first chapter lays down general principles: supremacy of the Constitution; rule of law; fundamental human rights and freedoms; the nation’s diverse cultural and traditional values; the inborn dignity and worth of each human being; the equality of all human beings; and good governance –explained as including regular free and fair elections, respect for the results of these elections, respect for every person’s rights, transparency, justice, accountability and responsiveness. I can’t argue with any of that. Trying to achieve these aims would be a great improvement on the politics of the past 50 years.
This chapter outlines the tiers of government, national, regional and local. My only reservation about any of this is that having 16 official languages, including sign language, could paralyse government because they’d spend all their time and a lot of our money on translating everything they say or write. Government should communicate with people in Binga or Beitbridge in their own language and children should be taught in their own language as far as possible, but that translation can be done locally. We don’t need every government document to appear in 16 languages on every notice board in the country.
Read on next week . . .
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis