A dead patient at an operation table

Sham in the Constitution Review process that we should all be ashamed of.

A dead patient at an operation table

 

By Opoka Christopher Arop

 

What better place to start than to look at the preamble to the Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan.

 

Recalling our long and heroic struggle for justice, freedom, equality and dignity in South Sudan; Remembering and inspired by the selfless sacrifices of our martyrs, heroes and heroines; Dedicated to a genuine national healing process and the building of trust and confidence in our society through dialogue;

 

Determined to lay the foundation for a united, peaceful and prosperous society based on justice, equality, respect for human rights and the rule of law; Committed to establishing a decentralized democratic multi-party system of governance in which power shall be peacefully transferred and to upholding values of human dignity and equal rights and duties of men and women;

 

Conscious of the need to manage our natural resources sustainably ad efficiently for the benefit of the present and future generations and to eradicate poverty and attain the Millennium Development Goals;

 

I ask myself, what is going on here. What are we trying to say? Are we writing a book? Should we not have a summary of what makes us South Sudanese?

 

So for good measure I looked up preamble of some countries’ constitutions. For example that of our friends the United States of America:

 

“In order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

 

This is the declaration of why United States of America is a united nation and not just a bunch of people in the same place. Everything else in the constitution is how, but the preamble is why America exists.

 

I could write a book for that matter on the subject of the content of the preamble to our constitution alone, especially how the preamble is a mirror starting point for all the things that have gone wrong since the start of the transitional period.

 

On the whole however, the verbose rhetoric in our preamble is much like the songs sung by war heroes when they return from battle, whether not they have won the war is another story.

 

In essence, the writing of this preamble is too emotional and failed to meet the minimum expected of it. It was and is meant to answer the question of why we are and how we got here? How we got here is another story altogether that would be tackled in the other parts of the constitution.

 

So, why did this blunder occur? What went wrong? Who went wrong? How can this be corrected in the Constitution Review Process?

 

The answer is simple, but difficult. Many have come and gone and still failed to answer why we exist as a South Sudanese nation state.

 

If we can ask this question to every single South Sudanese citizen, collect their responses, sieve out the emotional war hero rubbish; we may come at a more-straight forward, less wordy explanation as to why we are South Sudanese.

 

And then we may need some of our best writers to sum it all up in some few words that can be read and understood without drawing tears or anger in the same vain.

 

Now on the question of whether the Constitution Review Process is not already dead as we are all being called to make our input: When Professor Bereket Selassie was appointed Chairperson of Eritrea’s new Constitutional Commission in 1994, after a long drawn-out war of liberation, a liberation war far more brutal than ours perhaps, an armed struggle; he began by first taking into account Eritrea’s historical condition as well as examining various federalist constitutions including those of United States (Federalist Papers of the United States and Anti-Federalist Papers), but also he looked at African constitutions such as Ghana, South Africa, Ethiopia and so on.

 

Professor Bereket was actually an insider-outsider. By this I mean he was a member of the liberation movement in Eritrea but helped them from outside, as an advisor. He wasn’t a guerrilla fighter.

 

Therefore he knew the history and makeup of the revolution but when he took up the mantle of the chair of the commission, he acted as though he was an outsider in order to be able to make his input as little as possible.

 

By this he intended the commission to be independent, autonomous, without the influence of the movement ideologues and liberators alike. Once he was appointed, he wanted nobody to interfere with how he went about his business.

 

All we have seen both in government as well as in the other quarters are people who were insiders or insider-outsider as was the case with Professor Bereket, but who instead came in to propagate and elevate the ideas of the SPLM or those of the liberators.

 

So, it is no wonder that mismanagement and corruption in public service as in the army, worse so in the more recent drama of challenges facing the National Constitution Review Commission, including shortage of copies of the Transitional Constitution. And even without a constitution of the people and by the people, elections might go ahead using a constitution of the government.

 

The president offers full commitment and political will for the Constitution Review Process with one the hand, but fails to ensure adequate funding for the process itself with the other. A case of one hand washing itself, while the other remains dry. Possible only here in the Republic of South Sudan!

 

Fearing to loud Professor Bereket’s work for Eritrea’s Constitution, a work that was universally acclaimed as one of the best processes, the professor was quick to warn that while his operation was brilliant, the patient was already dead.

 

He said this because soon as he finished the constitution making process, the man who ruled the country, Isaias Afewerki who is in power for 18 years now decided to shelve the constitution it for fear that if it was implemented, then it would submit him for election and he feared he would be defeated; he then decided to rule by decree leading to Eritrea’s tragedy today.

 

Our case is not very different. The transitional constitution has not been anything far from a country ruled by decree. We have seen countless times how the president has made decisions by the powers conferred upon him in the constitution, a constitution that was passed by an SPLM dominated parliament and some appointed opposition members.

 

In the case of Republic of South Sudan, the situation could even be worse. We have an interim constitution whose drafting process was a sham, and whose final product (Part Six, Chapter II, Article 101, (r & s) on the functions of the President of the Republic of South Sudan; r. remove a state Governor and/or dissolve a state Legislative Assembly… s. appoint a state care-taker governor…) rejected by almost all the ten states that constitute the Republic of South Sudan.

 

This article was endorsed by the SPLM in the Transitional Constitution, but now the same SPLM led government is crying foul. And the people too during the civic education activities of the Constitution Review Process, called for clipping of the powers of the president in the new constitution.

 

Mr. Jason Gluck who was sent to our country as a Constitutional Consultant and owing to his experience as Senior Rule of Law Advisor with United States Institute for Peace in Iraq, said about his mission to South Sudan that post conflict states struggle with issues of power-sharing and how to divide national wealth as well as parliamentary or presidential system, to issues of size of decentralization in the ten states of South Sudan. His good intentions were a precursor for the return plane ticket to Washington DC.

 

The issue of power is direct. The problem is that people who are given power, all those who themselves arrogate power to themselves as the result of a liberation struggle or whatever; tend to lose perspective (of the reasons they fought and the liberation songs they sung).

 

They lose perspective, and they arrogate themselves more power than they deserve, and they expect people to honor them and obey them come what may.

 

And Professor Bereket couldn’t agree more. Prof. adds: “Let me just say that because South Sudan is a neighbor of mine, and I have known many of the South Sudanese who struggled against the domination of the northern Arab Islamic forces, that they should be very careful in NOT putting too much trust on the revolutionaries who brought about the South Sudanese  independence.” And here we have just done what he asked us not to, both as loyalist citizenry who have placed our life in the hands of the army along with our liberties, liberties we assume the army will protect.

 

According to a WikiLeaks diplomatic cable in which the U.S. ambassador there described Afewerki as “unhinged,” “cruel and defiant,” the former hero of Eritrea's independence movement announced in May 2008 that elections would be postponed for “three or four decades” or longer because they “polarize society.”

 

No doctor should waste their time treating a corpse. This time is better spent diagnosing and treating other sick people. Our predicament it appears is that, our corpse is a country, and the leaders who don’t want to be buried without their citizens.