Some people better qualified than me were publishing their articles on the subject, and I was getting confused by the rate at which further amendments were reported, changing the draft that was supposed to summarise what we, the people, said we wanted. The task was getting too big for me. Now I pen a warning because nearly everybody sounds confused these days, and Zanu (PF) seems to be aiming to confuse us all.
The issue is no longer the length of the president’s term or how many MPs we have, or how they are elected. They are trying to make us unsure of what the draft says.
They would be scoring some kind of a victory, in their own eyes at least, if they could, by a combination of multiplying frivolous late amendments and pressing for an early referendum on the draft, ensure that when the referendum comes none of us can be sure what the draft we are voting on actually says.
We are near to that unfortunate situation already. We long ago passed the day when we should all have said “No more meddling with our draft – print it and circulate it!” Now we need to be reminding COPAC that, if they do manage to send a draft to the printers, they may need to ensure that the job is not given to the Government Printers. And, whatever printer they choose, they must watch every stage of the process very carefully so that the text that emerges at the end of the process is the same one they gave the printers at the start.
I am not telling you scare stories for the fun of it. Remember what happened to the Global Political Agreement? The parties signed a draft text, then, by the time they had printed copies in their hands, Zanu (PF) had a text that differed in several important ways from the text in the hands of the MDC. We can’t afford much more of this kind of nonsense.
Time is short. Nit-picking arguments about clauses at this stage would be like straightening each other’s ties with great care while a clever thief is quietly stripping us of our trousers. The time we spend on abstruse arguments about finer points of constitutional procedure is time that Zanu (PF) have won to finish stripping everyone who isn’t subservient to the big kleptocrats of any economic power.
Make no mistake; the economy is the real battlefield. The constitution is a sideshow to that, but one that Zanu (PF) uses to distract us from the main issue. An inconclusive referendum on an uncertain text would mean more confusion and delay. The time has come for our representatives who have seen some of the versions we only read third-hand accounts of, to declare “Enough is enough. If we don’t have an agreed text now, we never will. This process cannot be completed till Zanu (PF) stop monkeying with our text.”
Yes, that would probably produce a deadlock, but that is not a dead end – not until we are all dead. It would probably provoke a crisis, but why are our elected representatives afraid of that? The Chinese word for ‘crisis’ combines the symbols for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’ and Chinese traditional wisdom, got that right, as it so often does.
We can’t go on playing this Zanu (PF)-designed game. Refusing to pretend we are still playing will create two challenges: first, to all of us to produce a new creative way out of the mess or, failing this, to the guardians of democracy in SADC and the AU to step in decisively. Let’s pray they still remember how.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis