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| Columns |
| Business impact of Section 65 ruling |
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by
D D Phiri, 13 November 2006
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09:06:12
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The decision by Constitutional Court on Section 65 of the Malawi Constitution has naturally been received with mixed feelings. Those who have been smarting from the apparent disertation of their former party by those who are now on the side of the government are jubilant. So sweet is revenge.
Already these people are urging the Speaker to convene Parliament at once to deal with what they call a crisis. But has the decision of the Constitutional Court amounted to a crisis? I do not think so. The crisis exists in the minds of those who wish to fish in troubled waters.
Though the court decision is subject to appeal, I will discuss what I take to be a fait accompli, an accomplished fact.
If on both sides of the House there is a will to provide the country with much needed political stability, the court decision on Section 65 can just be turned over to the Law Commission for its revision exercise.
If both sides of the House resolve not to task the Speaker to take any action on Section 65 decision, matters will end there. I do not think members of the civil society will come out in demonstrations. They have no interest in chaos or cabinet posts. They care most about fish and fertilisers.
Should the Speaker declare the 70 or so seats vacant, this would naturally necessitate by-elections at the very time the holding of Local Government Elections has not been sorted out. Some parliamentary seats have fallen vacant due to deaths. The holding of by-elections will require millions of kwacha expenses.
Let a neutral party calculate how much money will be required to pay for the by-election. Most likely it will amount to billions. Where will this money come from? The first casualties might be votes for education, health and agriculture. Should we transfer some of the funds from the Ministry of Education and let the teachers boycott classes because they are unpaid or unhoused?. Should we take some of the money from the Ministry of Agriculture and withdraw subsidies on fertilisers thereby risk future famines? Everything you do has costs and benefits.
Those of you who want the Speaker to declare the seats vacant, do not just stop there, tell the nation where the money will come from.
I can see someone with muddled thinking saying let us use the funds arising out of debt cancellation. He or she thinks the IMF, the World Bank and donors have given us millions of dollars to splurge about. They have done nothing of the sort. They have just said whatever millions of dollars our exports will earn in future, we may keep the lot for ourselves instead of using some of them to settle the debts.
We still have to struggle to earn money by exports. This will require political stability, not crises, as a precondition for investment. At the moment Malawi’s image within the international community is a good deal brighter than at any time during the past 20 years. The DPP government has managed to persuade the donor community to cancel the billions worthy of dollar debts which the MCP and UDF had accumulated and then failed to settle.
The whole nation is looking forward to at least a decade hence when the country might be free of heavy external debts. It can then spend its tax and export earnings on priority projects and services. If the Constitutional Court’s decision is exploited to become a crisis foreign investors will once more hesitate to come here and Malawi will continue wallowing in poverty.
It is up to the civil society to once more remind parliament what the Roman sage Cicero said: Salus Populi. Suprema Lex,” meaning the welfare of the people is the supreme law! Whatever Section 65 says, if in implementing it at present, the country is to be thrown into a crisis, then the court decision should just be noted for future occasions not the present time. Those who want power should wait for the year 2009. The welfare of the people cannot be sacrificed on the altar of their ambitions. Law exists to set people free, not to enslave them.
Holding by-elections for more than 70 seats will aggravate the inflation rate. In order to fight the elections those in authority will be tempted as the MCP and UDF governments were to “borrow” money from the Reserve Bank. This will be a euphemism for instructing the central bank to print more notes. These will cause galloping if not hyper-inflation. Deposits in the banks, wages and salaries will lose their purchasing powers. It is a very unfortunate country where its most influential politicians seem to care little about the economic consequences of what they do or say.
Debt cancellation will be a mere passing phase unless those in authority including parliamentarians practice austerity. They may call a Parliament to last two weeks, likely it will last four. |
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