If I could, I wouldn’t: Five reasons I wouldn’t vote for the Draft Constitution

We the People of Zimbabwe...

It begins with so much promise, so much hope but somewhere along the way it teeters horribly towards the edge before catching itself in its skirts and tumbling into an oblivion created by its own self contradictions. The Zimbabwean ‘Final Draft’ Constitution which has taken several years and an obscenely large amount of money to create fails to live up to the task that its creators and the people of Zimbabwe had set upon it. Its genesis was mired in controversy and this less than auspicious birth is reflected in its one hundred and seventy two pages.

As a Zimbabwean living in the diaspora I have also been alarmed by the complete lack of information surrounding the document. Many of my friends had never seen the document let alone read it. Many did not know what the fundamental differences between it and the Lancaster House Constitution it was replacing were and yet more did not have the slightest inkling of an idea what its implications were.

So out of the infinite goodness of my heart, I have summarized my top five biggest gripes with the ‘Final Draft’ Constitution. Comment is free so let’s talk about this document that is supposed to dictate the direction that the Zimbabwean sovereign experiment will take.

1.       Process, process, process

My first issue with the document itself has nothing to do with the document itself but the  way it was crafted. For those of you who follow Zimbabwean events, the Zimbabwean government spent millions of dollars reaching out to the Zimbabwean populace, trying to get their views on what they wanted in a new Constitution. At the end of all this information gathering what then happened? The two principal political parties bickered for months on end, grandstanding and posing, until they finally came up with a compromise ridden version that suited their needs.

Which begs the point, why ask the opinion of Zimbabweans if they opinion was not going to be of paramount concern ahead of the interests of Political Party X vs Political Party Y. Where were the civic organisations, the human rights groups, the universities, the Lawyers and the Intellectuals during the bickering phase? Where were the people of Zimbabwe? Oh yes, that’s right, their voice didn’t count did it.

2.      Executive President

The ‘Final Draft’ Constitution retains the post of Executive President amongst other things that should have been thrown out with the bathwater (more of that soon). The President is described as “the Head of State and Government”.

Most countries like the United Kingdom and Germany separate the two functions, for example David Cameron is the head of government and Elizabeth II is the head of state, François Holland is the Head of State and Jean-Marc Ayrault is the Head of Government. The reason in most cases is to split power and avoid vesting it in the arms of one person. In a country like the United States of America which combines the two, a complicated system of checks and balances is put in place to counteract the resulting concentration of power. Failure to do that means one person elects all Ministers, Deputy Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Ambassadors, Chiefs, Judges of the Supreme and Constitutional Court, Commissioners of all entities whose function is to provide oversight of the Presidency…. The problem should be apparent.

3.      Retained too much of what was bad about Lancaster

In this section I include: an unlimited number of Ministries (Zimbabwe has almost double (40) the amount of Ministries than South African(25) despite having an economy a tenth of the size [USD550 billion versus USD6 billion], incidentally Switzerland has 7 Ministers), a Senate (again a matter of size), reserved seats in Senate for Chiefs (really? Why?), an amazing ability to grant a right then add a ‘but…’ several chapters down the line. A glaring example is the constitution’s lengthy declaration that men and women are created equal then several chapters later prohibit execution of female criminals under any circumstances (think about it carefully: a man could kill one person and be executed, a woman could kill an entire village of children and receive nothing worse than jail time). Others include property rights which are granted then curtailed for foreigners/descendants of foreigners whose land was “redistributed” (this also after a lengthy description that all citizens of Zimbabwe are equal whether by birth or descent) or in the case of the class of land identified as Agricultural Land which can be seized by the Government with no notice at all (contradicting a previous article), not compensation (contradicting another article to respect International Law [SADC law obligates a government to compensate the owner of the property for the value of the land]), and removing the possibility of the owner approaching the courts (which contradicts the article on the inviolability and supremacy of the courts).  

4.      Too much of what was talked about by Zimbabweans is missing

In this list I will include: multiple citizenship, voting rights for Zimbabweans living outside of the borders of Zimbabwe, retroactive application of some of the provisions of the Constitution (a controversial one I admit but still,,,we wanted it, we should have gotten it), protection or declaration of any sorts of LGBT rights (the writers decided to skip the issue entirely), an attempt (even a weak one) at decentralization of power from the centre….

5.     A compromised document no matter what you call it is a compromised document

It reflects that in its lack of defining anything. The “Yes…but” nature of it all. Government is tasked with protecting freedoms, “within the means available to it” (what are those means? Who decides what’s reasonable, what is sacrosanct and can’t be touched). At the end of the day it is a lawyer’s paradise, you can argue your way out of anything by referring to another chapter within its pages and that’s exactly the problem with long constitutions, especially long bargained ones. It is a dictator’s dream, you get to choose who overlooks your work and Parliament is given the side kick role of rubber stamping Executive Orders. At the end of the day, and most frightening of all, it is a citizen’s nightmare and that’s why I would vote NO, if I had the means to vote this coming Saturday.  

You should too. 

The Final Draft Constitution of the Republic of Zimbabwe

As part of my civic duty as outlined in Chapter 1, Section 7 subsection (c) of the Draft Constitution, I am posting the "Final Draft Constitution" of the Republic of Zimbabwe for the consumption of my fellow citizens.

This act no way implies that I agree, endorse or support this draft in any way or form. I am simply acting in the interests of my fellow citizens reaching an informed decision by themselves and reaching a decision on whether to support this document or not.

I will post a summary of my thoughts on the document soon.

Click here to download the document as a Microsoft Word document.

Voices of Africa

Are you ever one of those people who complain (loudly) about the portrayal of Africa in (Western) media? I know I am one of them and I have written about it several times (including here on the Global Changemakers site). Well I was told long ago that complaining and then proceeding to do nothing about the thing which you complained is just as good as keeping quiet and I want to challenge you all 'complainers' out there take part in an amazing project that has been doing something about the image of the African continent and the people who populate her lands.

Voices of Africa is an ambitious project launched by the Mail and Guardian some years ago that aims in their own words to: 

"..tell the stories the world doesn’t hear often enough. We believe the everyday accounts of Africans getting on with life and showing adversity the middle finger deserve more attention. From the fashion-crazy women in Dakar to the eligible bachelors in Somalia; from the extravagant weddings in Tanzania to the nightlife in Nairobi, we want to showcase life in Africa by those who live it."

I find a quote by the Editor of Voices quite profound, she talks about the negative vs positive extremes we see so often in the media and says something that for me sums up the whole project: "An emerging market”, “exotic” women, technology booms, safaris, and National Geographic-worthy sunsets don’t sum us up either. They reduce us."

We are people before we are Africans. Just like the Europeans, the Asians, the Asians; we are just people with all their consequent faults, strengths, joys and profound sorrows. And that is the story the world needs to see more than exclamations about how great it is that our literacy rates are improving or how sad it is that wars have blossomed in several African states. The fact that those Africans fighting those wars, those African grandmothers learning how to read in a shack in some distant rural village are just people. Add your voice, head on over to the Voices of Africa site, take a look at the guidelines and submit your story for publication. :)

I dare you to change the way the world views our continent.

Of Border Posts and Efficient Inefficiency

Dear Honourable Minister,

It’s 4am right now, and more sensible people than me are resting and preparing for the day yet to come. Yet I find myself feeling the urgent need to throw in my two cents on recent comments you uttered about the deplorable state of the Zimbabwe – South Africa border post.

You very rightly pointed out that the border post is in a state that is not befitting what is for many visitors to our country, their first point of contact with Zimbabwe. It is a slow, dusty, dirty, inefficient, bureaucratic nightmare that for many consumes up to seven (and more recently forty-eight)  hours of their lives each time they attempt to navigate its treacherous terrain. This is a state of affairs that I agree with you, cannot and should not be allowed to continue. But that is where my agreement with you ends. I simply do not think that building a new border post will solve the problem we are currently facing. Perhaps I may be wrong, and heaven knows that the view from the top might be very different from my view as an ordinary Zimbabwean citizen who had to navigate the border post over a dozen times in the past year.

My reasoning starts with the fact that I think that the problem with Beitbridge border post is the Beitbridge border post. In over ninety percent of my travels, the problems always occur on the Zimbabwean side of the border and hardly ever on the South African side. If we are to build a second border with South Africa, my imagination somehow seems to think that the Beitbridge border post (along with all its officials, information systems and their attendant problems) will be used as a template and we will have not one but two problems. Allow me to put forward the proposition that two problems are worse than one, and certainly no problem is better than one. So what do I propose as a solution? Getting rid of the one problem we currently have: the Beitbridge border post.

Please bear with me, I am not proposing tipping the entire edifice into the Limpopo (though I confess the thought has occurred to me on several occasions as I stood in what seemed a never ending queue). I am proposing completely rethinking the way the current border post is run, the way it is managed and the way its handles visitors.

As it stands the border post is inefficiently and horribly run; I have seen occasions where only two desks will be manned by Immigration officials yet there is a queue that stretches to the near horizon. In an age where smartphones are talking to their owners, the border post still relies on Immigration officials manually reading visitors passports, there is no system to discriminate Zimbabweans entering Zimbabwe from foreigners (one would assume that would automatically benefit the Zimbabweans who do not have to go through visa checks of any kind from the foreigners, who would also be benefited in not having to queue with the significantly greater volume of citizens) and despite the fact that buses contribute the greatest flow of human traffic there is still no discernible effort to try and fast track their flow through the border post.

The border post is also corruptly run. I have witnessed with mine own eyes bus passengers being made to pay twenty rands each to skip Customs checks. Those buses which refuse to pay are then held up deliberately and in some cases I have seen buses pay off one official then be held up by another official who demanded he be paid off in turn (One memorable standoff which began after we had passed through Immigrations and Customs and theoretically entered Zimbabwe lasted three hours).

At the moment, those are the two problems that stand out to me: inefficiency (both technological and human) and corruption. Here are a few thoughts from my sleep befuddled mind (I am hopeful that the readers of my blog will add their own two cents in the comments section). I propose increasing the manpower at the border post, the money that would be used to build another one would go well to hiring a few hundred extra officials. I propose dividing incoming traffic into distinct groups, Zimbabweans, SADC residents (who one assumes don’t need visas) and the rest of the world (who one assumes need visas and individual diplomatic calculations on the relative amount of time they are allowed into our country. Perhaps we could even go so far as to introduce a system where Zimbabweans who leave the country for less than a week actually don’t have to be ‘processed’ but need just present their ID’s (this is out there but thinking out of the box never hurt anyone methinks). At the very least, we could take a page out of our South African neighbours’ book and put up tents when the border is expecting peak traffic ("Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal" – Steve Jobs).

I propose modernizing the technology used at the border post, after all the trouble the Government takes to collect out fingerprints, would it be too much of an effort to imagine a fingerprint recognition system to scan in returning citizens? Or at the very least, passport readers to ease the strain on the Immigration officials. We have several universities with Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Departments, let them put their heads together to produce the necessary hardware and software needed. Politicians continually tell us about African solutions to African problems, here is a test case to test the efficacy of this mantra.

The corruption one is a bit trickier to negotiate. One would imagine that corruption would be eased if officials were paid better. Again, the millions that would go into a new border post would more than cover a bump in their salaries. And an anonymous tip off line to allow officials to call in their colleagues and a reward for these whistle-blowers? I have seen such strategies being employed by the corporate world, I would hazard a guess and say that this would go a long way in decreasing corruption. And perhaps a hot line that would allow travellers to simply SMS corrupt activity (and perhaps ideas) and the identity of the officials (prominent name badges on the officials perhaps?).

These are just a few of my sleep addled ideas. Perhaps in the light of a new day more ideas will come. But allow me to express my highest sentiments and the fervent hope that my ideas will perhaps start a conversation about the problem sitting at the gate of our beautiful country.

A Concerned Citizen,

Zikhali