My suggestion is simple: we bypass all the argument about presidential powers by appointing a constitutional monarch. The job is almost entirely ceremonial. In most constitutional monarchies the king or queen still has the final power to sign Acts of Parliament into law, but that doesn’t imply an arbitrary power of veto. The King of Belgium abdicated for a day a few years ago to avoid signing a Bill he felt was wrong; somebody else signed it and he came back the next day. His power is mainly by moral influence and, when that failed, he didn’t have to give up the job.
Political leaders should be grateful that this would free them for political work so they wouldn’t have to spend so much time attending banquets, laying foundation stones and doing other frivolous ceremonial duties. A ceremonial president, as Canaan Banana was, could do most of this, but the newspaper editors really need a royal family to solve their biggest problem.
What is this biggest problem? Look at the headlines. Even in a country with our level of political tension and turmoil, the poor editor can’t find headlines new enough to catch our eye every day. “Mugabe promises elections within a month” – he’s done that so often we all just yawn and turn to the sports page. “Zanu (PF) in turmoil” or “New split threatens in MDC” are both based on rumours from supposed insiders and generally the story doesn’t live up to the exciting promise of the headline; this reader just shrugs his shoulders and turns to the crossword or Sudoku. GDP set to rise (or fall) by 5% this year” arouses rather less interest than a forecast that we will get less than half, or more than double, the average rainfall this year.
Those things are not news until they happen, so I close the paper and ask myself whether I can afford a beer in the morning, or whether I’ll just have to do without that lubrication while playing tsoro or pool, or just “talk of many things, of shoes and sticks and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.” – which brings us back to my main point for the day.
The advantage of having a king or queen is that they bring a whole royal family along with them. There’s always plenty of news material: a pregnant granddaughter, or an alcoholic aunt, a daughter-in-law loved by half the population and detested by the rest, or a rakish nephew who has crashed another car or punched the noses of a couple of papparazzi. (Somebody needs to do that sometimes, but could a politician get away with it?)
Even in the most exciting situations, an editor of a daily newspaper can’t find enough real news to provide headlines that grab the readers’ imagination and make them eager to buy the paper to read more.
Even in our situation, 80% of the headlines about our politics look like either recycled repeats of something the editor used last week and the week before, or such wild guesswork that we know the story that follows can’t match the headline for interest. If we had a royal family, he could always find a story about one of that large cast of miscellaneous eccentrics.
Editors would not need to say anything about any politician unless the politician had actually done something significant, or made a promise we will all want to remind him of in six months’ time.
That would give us all enough time to ponder the significance of anything a politician really does, without all the noise about what they say they want to do, or what some “analyst” thinks they may be plotting.
The only problem I see is that a royal family are expensive to maintain; could we afford one? But would they cost us any more than some of our politicians do now?
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis