DEMOCRACY IS EXPENSIVE, BUT ISNT THERE A COST-EFFECTIVE WAY OF AMENDING OUR CONSTITUTION?

BY Kellys Kaunda

DEMOCRACY IS EXPENSIVE, BUT ISNT THERE A COST-EFFECTIVE WAY OF AMENDING OUR CONSTITUTION?

One of the major reasons we as a country need to be conscious of our public expenditure is that many are the basic necessities we continue to grapple with.

For instance, we needed to ask ourselves a question: did we need to spend money on sending a technical team to go round the country engaging with the public as a way of amending the constitution?

Remember, this was hardly a few months after the Electoral Reform Technical Committee, ERTC, employed a similar methodology to gather public views regarding the electoral process.

In both the ERTC and the Mushabati committee reports, there is nothing substantially new that previous consultative processes never covered.

In fact, if it’s the issue of delimitation, it’s a constitutional requirement that doesn’t need public input!

We have had so many constitutional review exercises, our needs are already contained in the files stored somewhere in government offices.

In the near future, if need arises, just dust those files and lift what has not been addressed yet and take it to parliamentarians to do what they are paid to do.

We gave these men and women our mandate, we can’t suddenly turn around and see them as a danger to our country.

The inflammatory language of politicians and critics is obscuring our sense of objectivity as a people.

Inflammatory language is the currency of politics. But we need to keep our heads cool and steady as a people and avoid getting sucked into partisan politics.

We have a collective responsibility to spend our taxes wisely.

And certainly, this time around, we didn’t exercise responsibility when we pushed for a costly exercise as a way of amending our constitution, an exercise that just ended up reproducing what we already had on government files.