An article on the ZBC website posted on the 27th of March 2012 suggests that ordinary people in Zimbabwe do not think that a new constitution is a priority. They posit that the people are more interested in ‘bread and butter’ issues than in a new constitution. While it is true that a new constitution on its own is not a panacea to our political and socio-economic problems, it is also true that the supreme law governs how we are governed by those we elect to power. In that sense I would argue that a new constitution is a prerequisite if we are to deal with the plethora of problems affecting our motherland.
I am not a legal scholar so I will avoid making legal arguments. However, my understanding of a constitution is that it allows us to increase or reduce the power that we give to the arms of government – the executive, the judiciary and the legislature. A good constitution allows people to put safeguards as well as checks and balances on the people we elect to power. The current constitution allows the President to have unlimited executive powers that mean that he can make judicial appointments after ‘consulting’ the Judicial Services Commission, which he also appoints. Under the current constitution the President appoints the Defence Forces Chiefs, the Commissioner General of Police, the CIO Director, etc without oversight from anyone. Therefore, the people appointed to these posts are answerable to the President rather than the people of Zimbabwe. This is what has created the problems that are bedevilling our country. A new constitution allows us, if we choose, to take these powers from one person and give them to Parliament. It allows us, if we choose, to give parliament oversight over all Presidential appointments. Any Presidential appointments would need to be confirmed by parliament before taking effect. This would mean an extra layer of checks to ensure that the President does not use the resources of the state to reward his cronies.
It would help illuminate this discussion if we knew what question or questions were asked the participants in this survey. It would also help to know how many people were asked the question to establish whether this is a representative sample. More importantly it would be important to establish the gender, education, religion, political views of the participants. However, this will make the discussion complicated. Let us stick to the simple argument put forward by the writer of the ZBC article. Let us examine the premise of the writer’s argument which is that, “Ordinary Zimbabweans say the current constitution making exercise, which has gobbled millions of dollars, is not a priority in a country where the majority of people are concerned with bread and butter issues.” This suggests that the writer/researcher is concerned about the cost of writing a new constitution at a time when that money could be directed to other ‘worthy causes’. If the survey question(s) were framed based on this premise then you would expect anyone living on the fringes of the Zimbabwean economy to say a constitution is not a priority when asked whether the money could be directed to other causes such as the failing water and sanitation in the capital city. But this argument is flawed because it assumes that because writing a new constitution costs a lot of money then we should not invest in it. The same argument could be made about elections. Elections cost millions which could be directed at improving the generation of electricity or to give loans to the new farmers. Following this logic, then elections would not be a priority for ordinary Zimbabweans. That indeed is absurd. There is a case to be made against the process and the end product of this process but that does not make rewriting our constitution a worthless exercise.
An unnamed person is quoted on the ZBC website: “I don’t even know how this constitution is going to benefit me, what I want at the moment is survival and I think government should prioritise hunger alleviation and improving our welfare,” said one Harare resident. The reason we have been reduced to ‘survival’ and ‘welfare’ is because those we entrusted with the levers of power made decisions on our behalf. In our name they made decisions without having to consult us that led to the economy haemorrhaging to death. The powers given to individuals and entities by the Zimbabwean constitution determine how they exercise power over us. It is, therefore, true that our current political and socio-economic situation is a direct result of our constitutional dispensation. The laws that we have in Zimbabwe have been shaped by the interaction between our politics and our constitution. I know some will argue that the constitution has been subverted as well as serially amended by the Zanu PF government but that is exactly the reason why we need to rewrite the constitution. The constitutional amendment that created the overarching Executive Presidency which is now part of our current constitution has allowed the President to wield more power than that of both houses of parliament. An individual can legislate and overrule all our elected representatives because our constitution allows him/her to. This is not about Robert Mugabe but about both the present and the future. If Robert Mugabe loses the next election his successor will still have the absolute monarchist powers that have been largely responsible for the crisis that we are currently going through. So I would want to say to Harare resident and others – Constitutions do matter. If we are going to shape the society that we want then the best way to articulate our values, beliefs, norms, etc is to have a new constitution.
I know that there are a lot of problems facing ordinary people in our country but we need to put the constitutional debate in context. Costs are not everything. We need to look at the Cost-Benefit analysis to get a clearer picture. I think that whatever money we spend on Constitution making or elections is money well spent if this helps to shape the political direction that we want our nation to take. We should not let those who want the preserve the status quo in the constitutional dispensation scare us by quoting the costs out of context. Once we go down this road we will have others arguing that because elections cost money then holding elections regularly is not a priority. I hope that it is only a minority of our people who hold similar views to those of residents quoted in the ZBC report because Constitutions do matter.
