eBusiness Weekly
Should the Constitutional Court declare this afternoon the winner of the just-ended Presidential election, rather than order a new poll, then on Sunday we will see our President for the next five years sworn in and we hope ready to appoint his Cabinet within days and get the Government working on solving Zimbabwe’s problems.
Regardless of who is declared the winner, there will be many new faces in the Cabinet, especially in the critical economic ministries, so there will be a need to bring the Government up to speed in a hurry. Fortunately those in line for ministerial appointments must already be thinking hard about what they would do if they were selected and so will at least be able to understand the briefings of their senior civil service advisors and be able to ask the right questions and initiate options and be able to select the right options. We assume both top candidates have been making lists of suitable people and have been giving a lot of weight to competence.
Very importantly the decision by the Constitutional Court ends the election period. There will be winners and losers, as always in an election, but the losers need to accept that they have the opposition role to play until the next election and the winners need to avoid triumphalism and at least communicate with the losers. There is a difference when running a Government in having an opposition determined to throw a spanner in every possible place and an opposition ready to watch your every move, criticize frequently but also ready to offer constructive alternatives that should at least be considered very seriously.
Continuing the election battle after the final decision is not helpful to either the contestants or the country. The Constitution carefully pushed election petitions for the Presidential poll into the Constitutional Court to ensure that a final decision, one that cannot be appealed because the top court made the ruling, comes as soon as possible after the election so ending all uncertainty. And presumably the Constitutional Court will also rule whether the seven day limit for launching a petition and the 14 day limit for the top court to make a final ruling refers to calendar days or court days to avoid future argument. In this case we are getting the final decision 21 calendar days after the announcement of the poll, and 25 days after we voted. So the delay has not been fatal.
After all the purpose of an election is to allow the people of Zimbabwe to choose the Executive and Legislature who will guide the nation for five years, not to have a continuous set of replays as if politics was a sport, with a set of weekly league games, rather than a tool to get things done. Politics is different from football and needs to be treated differently. It is a means, not an end in itself.
This does not mean losers have to like the decision of the people and the decision of the Constitutional Court. They just have to accept it. Many of our business readers will have been the loser in some complex civil case; but once the courts have ruled they then figure out their next step in light of practical realities rather than continue to live in the past and have a daily moaning session. Plans are made and everyone moves forward. And like businesses caught short in the courts, politicians also have to move on and figure out what they need to do in the light of reality rather than dreams.
We also need to remember that the decision on who our President will be, and his inauguration, also starts a countdown for the activation of the new Parliament. Both main parties have returned a selection of old hands, but both have a good crop of newcomers who need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible.
Parliament has gradually been assuming new roles and doing more work in the decades since independence with the creation of Parliamentary committees. These have been becoming ever more effective and it would seem desirable that the process continues. A smallish group of Parliamentarians can delve into policy and implementation of policy rather effectively, especially as a committee can summons who it likes to give evidence and answer questions.
Of course a committee is only as good as its members, placing a responsibility on both caucuses to choose the right people for each committee. Someone with a passion for a particular area of policy and preferably with some experience in that area will obviously be a lot more effective than someone with little interest and even less knowledge.
Committees have also been taking on the role, in some areas at least, at looking at draft legislation before it goes to the full chambers. We and many others would like to see more of this, especially if committee members have high levels of expertise. Getting legislation right is more important than scoring points in debate, but we see nothing wrong in opposition Parliamentarians making sure their contribution to improving legislation is recorded, so in the next election voters know what they did.
This committee examination of legislation needs to be extended to the vast number of statutory instruments gazetted each month; often this detailed implementation of a law is what really counts, rather than the enabling legislation. And while Parliament has the right to reject any statutory instrument soon after it is promulgated, it rarely exercises its right to even debate them. Committees could find the time to examine the instruments and figure out if they are useful, useless or downright dangerous.
We only have to reflect on how some amendments to the road traffic regulations were abused by police roadblocks before that was stopped to realise that if someone besides a minister and permanent secretary had gone through them first then a lot of trouble might not have happened in the first place. Some subsidiary legislation is not open to debate, for example a Presidential proclamation of a by-election. Some is not contentious. But that leaves a large residue where it could well be useful to have a minister accompanied by senior civil service advisors sitting in front of a sensible committee and justifying what they are doing.
