Section no.6 deals with the Legislature, which means mainly parliament – the people who make the laws that the Executive is supposed to carry out (or “execute”).
This is a very long section, and it goes into a lot of detail about how they are to be elected and how they are to conduct business in parliament. We can’t leave all the details for parliament to fill in, because this section is supposed to lay down the ground rules of how parliament works. Don’t trust anyone to write their own code of conduct. I still believe this could have been somewhat shorter and clearer, but exactly how is a difficult question.
On one point I fear it is dangerously wrong. It bans political parties from receiving help from anyone outside the country. That is not the way to promote democracy when one party owns nearly all the productive land and the richest mines, as well as controlling commerce and transport and the armed forces. That really loads the whole system in their favour – whether or not, now they have all that power outside parliament, they decide to let parliament be elected freely and talk freely.
The USA used to have a rather better rule, but they have just dropped it and could face disaster without it. The rule set a limit on how much any company could be allowed to donate to a political party’s election funds. The question isn’t whether the money comes from outside the country; it is whether it comes from people who buy more than their fair share of influence. Under that rule in the US, most of the big companies were giving all they were allowed to the Republicans, so the Democrats were at a disadvantage.
Obama found an answer to that – he appealed for everyone who believed in his ideals to cough up what they could. Millions of people who had never contributed to a political party before made their contributions, some of them as little as $5. This added up to more than the Republicans collected from big business. Figure it out: even if the average individual contribution was only $50, 10 million contributions could add up to big bucks. The Republicans have used their influence with the Supreme Court to overthrow that limit, so they’ve got the really big bucks this time and they’ve run the most expensive campaign ever. That worries me. I don’t look to America for salvation, but the Democrats have shown more care for the poor and for providing them with health care, education and jobs – from Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, through the Kennedys (Bob would have made a better president than Jack) to Lyndon Johnson and Obama, whose one success in four years was to set up a medical aid programme.
If we see the US slip permanently into the hands of the Republicans and the military-industrial complex, then we’ll all be crying out for a US president who isn’t quite as big a devil as the Bushes or Tricky Dicky Nixon. So we don’t need a total ban on foreign contributions (governments’ contributions should be banned) but a limit on the size of anyone’s contribution. If a few big businesses were funding one party, it wouldn’t matter whether they were foreign, like Anjin or Anglo-American, or local, like the Mujuru, Mnangagwa, Masiiwa or Mawere business empires. It would be bad for democracy and for all of us if anyone was allowed that kind of power.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis