Acclaimed founding father of the US constitution and its Bill of Rights in the 18th century, and the fourth country’s president, James Madison, wrote: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
There are many South Africans, driven by political ideology, who believe the country’s Constitution is a “sell-out” product, borne out of the “discredited Codesa (Convention for a Democratic SA) sell-out project”.
At a rally at the Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban, early this year to launch the EFF’s manifesto, the party’s president Julius Malema said: “We are not part of the 1994 elite pact… We don’t owe the Boers anything. We are a new generation with our own challenges.
“We must not apologise because we never promised white people that we’ll never take the land.”
The EFF leader then described the judiciary as being “captured”, bent on playing politics by taking away the “fundamental and absolute rights” he believed the members of parliament were entitled to.
On the other side of the same political coin, the MK Party said, had it won the May 29 elections, it would have “scrapped the colonial and liberal constitution”, replacing it with a parliamentary sovereignty-based constitution, which would, as did the apartheid regime, allow the legislature the freedom to pass whatever law they chose, even if it were oppressive and undemocratic.
By implication, this would have had the effect of dismantling Section 2 of the Bill of Rights embedded in the country’s Constitution, taking the country back to the dark days just like it was done under unjust apartheid laws that were rubber stamped by parliament, denuding the judiciary the testing powers needed to ensure the laws passed by the legislators were compatible with the supreme law of the country—the Constitution.
If the judiciary were stripped of its testing powers, what would stop parliament from abusing its untrammelled powers from passing unconstitutional laws?
There would be no Bill of Rights to protect the citizens from the ill will of the majority.
Drawing from the above, it seems the EFF and MK Party are blinded by
ideological cobwebs, stripped of human rationality.
It was former president Jacob Zuma, who as the head of the state for nine years, orchestrated state capture, helped by his cronies to dismantle the thriving state bequeathed him by the Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki administrations.
The Zondo commission’s report is irrefutable in this regard about the complicity of Zuma in the state capture project.
Former chief justice Raymond Zondo once came close to breaking to tears when stories of plunder and looting were narrated at the commission’s hearings.
What is also true is that the ANC, at the time it enjoyed a massive majority in parliament, backed out and failed to support motions of no confidence against Zuma for his role in state capture and constitutional delinquency.
In various interviews after his retirement, Zondo bemoaned the ANC’s failure to muster courage to do the right thing, which was to precipitate the impeachment of Zuma for his crimes.
Malema and former Cosatu general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, among others, should not be absolved for giving this country a man as morally fractured as Zuma.
They saw in him a messiah to save SA and said so in so many words when he dislodged former ANC president Mbeki from power in Polokwane, Limpopo, in 2008 and subsequently from state power a matter of months later.
Does it then not sound curious that Zuma and Malema, now want to change the Constitution, seeing it as “colonial” when they were part of its creation?
To be sure, it was not until Malema was expelled from the ANC in 2012, and formed the EFF, that he showed animosity towards Zuma.
In what would be a turning point in Malema’s relation with Zuma, the EFF coined the “pay back the money” refrain following the Nkandlagate scandal connected to the security upgrades to Zuma’s compound, which cost taxpayers R246 million.
So, what rationale is there to justify changing the Constitution? Could it be that the bone of contention revolves around their exclusion from the government of national unity?
Or could it be that even as Otto Von Bismarck asserts that politics is the art of the possible, we still need angels to guard our political systems, for humans, in the words of Madison, suffer imperfection.
• Mdhlela is a freelance journalist, an Anglican priest, an ex-trade unionist and former editor of the South African Human Rights Commission journals
