Laura Miti Questions Government Justifications for Bill 7

Whats the  Justifications for Bill 7

By  Laura Miti

President Hichilema, in his press address this morning, started by setting out the economic survival first, and then the progress that the country has made since he came into office.
I agree that his government must be commended for how it has managed the economy.
The simple fact is that no one has concretely told us how they could have painlessly charted the path out of the debilitating debt and economic mess we were in.
True, too, is that this government’s social spending has been remarkable, considering how dry our coffers were.

It was the President’s thoughts on the Constitution that worried me. I just don’t get how the President can insist that those who have expressed their concern with the Bill 7 process are doing so as a personal slight against him.
No, Mr President, you can’t make our Constitution about your person. The supreme law of the land belongs to the people of the land. “We the people give ourselves this Constitution,” is what the preamble says. It is, therefore, patently wrong to centre one of the Constitution’s own creations in discussing its amendment. Mr President, your office is a creature of the Constitution. Never take its discussion personally.

Let me address the President’s claim that this is the first time citizens are standing up against a constitutional amendment they do not want.
What about Bill 10 and President Chiluba’s third-term bid? Surely the President remembers how both those attempts at amending the Constitution in the interest of the sitting government were defeated by the people. This President was actually part of rejecting Bill 10. That citizen resistance was loud and did go into the streets peacefully. Any violence came from the then government.

I will have to ask the same question the President asked us. If citizens stood up against President Chiluba’s and President Lungu’s attempts to amend the Constitution in a way they did not like, why not him? Why was standing up against Bill 10 the right of citizens, but against Bill 7 it is a personal attack on the sitting President?
What has changed?

As for 1996, come on Mr President! The reason the Mung’omba Commission was set up was because the day after the 1996 Constitution passed, it was already a big problem. As many will remember, 1996 was a most problematic amendment whose aim was to introduce the parentage clause that barred President Kaunda from contesting the next election, and also the simple-majority win for the presidential election that gave us a problematic first Mwanawasa term. Both those changes upset citizens enough to be subsequently changed.
That is exactly where we would be if Bill 7 passed  needing an amendment even before the President’s signature dried on it.

Then, there is this idea of fronting CDF to justify delimitation. CDF is less than 5 percent of the budget. Why not speak about all the other non-constituency-based resources that have the responsibility of changing our rural areas? Most mischievous about that argument is the claim that one needs delimitation in order to share CDF equitably.
The Constitution does not say Kanchibiya and Lusaka Central should receive the same CDF amount. That decision is made by the sitting government, just like it decides the CDF amount. Just like UPND did not need a constitutional amendment to increase CDF, it does not need one to share CDF according to need.

By the way, Mr President, by stating that those who do not want the Constitution amended in a rushed, government-centred manner are motivated by the desire to have someone else in office, it can be concluded that you too want to change the Constitution right now only for political reasons.

I will end with the matter of dialogue. Yes, Mr President, you did invite CSOs to State House to discuss Bill 7. You have to agree, though, that the sense of disappointment felt by many arises directly from that meeting and the promise you categorically made when deferring the passage of Bill 7 through Parliament.
Mr President, no one in that meeting would have agreed to the Technical Committee being set up only on Bill 7 clauses, only to launder the rejected Bill in a rushed, shoddy process where no two sittings followed the same rules.

Essentially, the feeling, Sir, is of being promised a hearty meal of chicken and uncovering the plate to find chicken feet swimming in watery soup.
Dialogue is only useful if both parties can expect that it is being done in good faith, and that nothing agreed will be fundamentally changed post-discussion. Dialogue is not an end in itself. It is not meant to be a box-ticking exercise.

To end, here is a variation of the question the President asked the nation this morning:
What is in Bill 7 that the UPND so desperately wants it, now?