The most notorious incident in his genocidal campaign was the siege of the city of Drogheda, where the whole population was massacred. In a story published about this, a rich citizen who had done a deal with Cromwell and been given a document promising him safe passage, tried to escape from the doomed city. When English soldiers stopped him, he told them he was protected by this document.
The captain of the troop asked to see it. “Hold it so I can read it,” said the captain, so the man held it in front of his chest. The captain fired his gun at the paper. The “protected” man dropped dead, shot through the heart. “That’s funny,” said the captain, “it didn’t protect him.”
Our new constitution could be like that document. It is just a piece of paper, and like that document, it won’t protect us if it isn’t respected. It may make a lot of good promises; I haven’t studied it well enough to be sure of that, but whatever it says, it will be meaningless if we don’t all obey it. That is the real problem.
We have heard empty promises before, even in the discredited Lancaster House constitution and more clearly in the Global Political Agreement of 2009, but they were meaningless because one powerful party had no intention of observing the promises they signed. In the GPA we were promised that the leader we voted for would be Prime Minister, to share power, but Dead BC still calls his rival “Head of State and Government and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces (why don’t they add ‘Chancellor of all Universities’?), leaving nothing for the Prime Minister. The PM’s supporters and anyone suspected of supporting him are still harassed, killed and tortured.
When we should have been consulted on the constitution, meetings set up to hear our opinions were disrupted, and the ruining party made further changes to suit themselves, so whatever it is, the result is not a people-driven constitution.
We were promised a free press and freedom of the airwaves. We do have some independent newspapers, but they still operate under difficulties and harassment. We have no independent broadcasting stations and no free discussion on Dead BC. The same old commissars sit on the press commission and the electoral commission is not changed.
We have the same old voters’ roll, with three million or so dead people registered.
POSA, AIPPA and the Broadcasting Act are still there. We still have the same police State that was set up in 1965 and strengthened since 1980. Independent journalists and lawyers are still persecuted. If judges and magistrates want to keep their jobs, the best they can do is to pretend to be sick when they are called on to pass politically-motivated verdicts, leaving political prisoners in jail without trial.
The people who do all this must change their ideas or be changed. Why are we not demanding this more loudly? Yes, the WOZA women protest and go to jail, but if all of us who grumble into our drinks did the same, the jails couldn’t hold us all. We need to change our ideas and change our ways. If we don’t, the wicked British will do a deal to get their hands on a share of our diamonds and we can’t rely on Chinamasa to dissuade them.
Remember when every schoolboy used to write on his exercise book: All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing?
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis