Commonwealth to African Nations: Stop Changing Your Constitutions
Commonwealth Secretary General Donald McKinnon made a trip to Zambia recently where he stated the obvious — African states need to stop changing their constitutions so frequently or no one will take the documents seriously.
The Times of Zambia summarized his comments by writing,
. . . [Luskin said] that constitutions should not be changed for the sake of it but only when absolutely necessary.
. . .
He gave an example of the United States (US) constitution which has been in existence for over 200 years but had been amended only on a few occasions.
“The US constitution is a solid document that has been amended on a number of times and mainly it has been to fit into the modern times,” he said.
In fact sometimes it seems some developing nations have had more constitutions than the U.S. constitution has amendments (okay, that is an exaggeration but not by much).
A bigger problem is establishing a political culture that sees a constitution a document that is untouchable except in extreme situations, which has not always been easy to establish even in the United States (as prohibition certainly demonstrated). That requires political parties to subjugate their goals to a constitutional political process which can often be frustrating, rather than pursuing extra-constitutional solutions at the drop of a hat which seems to happen all too frequently in developing countries.
Source:
‘Club’ chief cautions Africa over constitutions. Times of Zambia, June 16, 2003.
The Commonwealth to African Nations: Stop Changing Your Constitutions by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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