IT’S GERRYMANDERING, MEANT TO BENEFIT ONE PARTY
By Musa Mwenye,SC
The Constitution must never be imposed upon or bequeathed to citizens by the leaders, the citizens must give themselves the Constitution and it must be formulated through wide consultation and consensus. That is why, the very first words of the Constitution of Zambia are “WE, THE PEOPLE OF ZAMBIA”.
The Constitution making process must be open and transparent because legitimacy, is the corner stone of constitution making and there can never be legitimacy, when the people are ambushed with a draft constitution. How the Constitution is made is as important, if not more important than the contents of the Constitution. In fact, an agreed and transparent process, protects the content and conversely, if the process is hidden, non inclusive and controversial, there is a high risk that the clauses that will be put in the Constitution will be meant to favour some sections of society and unfairly disadvantage others.
In any case, it is highly undesirable to amend a constitution just before elections especially if the process is contentious and, particularly if the amendments will touch on any clause that bears directly on the next general elections. This also applies to delimitation or increase of constituencies. Delimitation or increase of constituencies is a well known source of electoral controversy and potential electoral manipulation to the extent that, it has even acquired a technical term- gerrymandering!
Gerrymandering is the manipulation of electoral constituency boundaries so as to benefit one party. Where gerrymandering has been done, the number of constituencies in certain political party strong holds is increased by splitting existing constituencies on the pretext that they are too big, so that, that particular political party has an inbuilt majority of constituencies. In functioning democracies, because of the risk of gerrymandering, delimitation or increase of constituencies must only be done after the proposed new constituency boundaries are agreed to, by all the stakeholders.
It is doubtful that increasing constituencies and, consequently, the number of members of parliament who will be paid by the tax payer, is an urgent priority that cannot wait until after next year. Perhaps we should instead concentrate our efforts on making the Members of parliament we have now, more effective. Looking at the state of our economy, it may be a bad time to increase the burden on the tax payer, by increasing the number of members of parliament who we have to pay allowances and gratuities to and buy Landcruiser VX’s for.
Finally, although it can be improved through an agreed and consultative process, the current Constitution is the best we have had since independence. Some of us campaigned for many many years, for the 50%+1 vote clause, running mate clause, fixing of the date of the elections in the Constitution, hand over of power to the speaker of the National Assembly, if elections are contested in court etc and these clauses are in the current Constitution. We must resist the temptation to remove these progressive clauses from the Constitution or even to water them down because they serve and enhance our democracy.