Celebrating Constitution Day: February 9, 2014

I’m one of those Namibians who at the tender age of 19 witnessed the drafting of Namibia’s Constitution in 1989 after the United Nations-supervised elections in November 1989, the first democratic elections in Namibia after the failed elections of 1978. The drafting of the Supreme Law had to be done within 80 days because the constitution was a prerequisite for independence. The 72 elected members then gathered in the Tintenpalast to form the Constituent Assembly which had the mandate of drafting a piece of legislation which will one day be known as the Constitution of the Republic of Namibia. The members of the Constituent Assembly were people who for many years of the liberation struggle did not meet face to face because of their different political ideologies. Some sceptics expected a “ticking time bomb” to explode in the Constituent Assembly. The then Swapo Shadow Minister of Foreign Affairs, Theo-Ben Gurirab, broke the ice by moving that the 1982 Constitutional Principles form the basis on which the constitution had to be drafted. After the adoption of those Principles the actual work of drafting the constitution commenced in earnest. During the debates on issues to be encapsulated in the Constitution, members were boiling at times, harsh language used, enmity expressed but at the end of the day these members realised they were given a mandate by the Namibians waiting outside for that piece of legislation to materialise. There were issues on which the Assembly at one stage almost broke up, had it not been for the leadership of the chairman, Dr Hage Geingob. The main sticking points were the executive presidency and the second house of parliament. Swapo was in favour of an executive presidency and rejected the concept of bicameralism, which the other parties in the Assembly wanted. On the executive presidency, Dirk Mudge of the DTA asked Swapo why they wanted an executive president, and that question remained unanswered. The Assembly spent a considerable time on debating the issue of a second house of parliament. The opposition parties were of the opinion that a second house would represent the people at grassroots level and preserve our regional and ethnic diversity. The National Assembly would not feel accountable to the grassroots because they are not directly elected by them, the opposition felt. Swapo succumbed to the wish of the opposition and the establishment of the National Council was enacted. A committee was established to refine the constitution and to give it the shape it has today. Two constitutional experts from South Africa were assigned to this committee to help with the formulation. At no point did those experts tell our leaders what to write. This was so because our leaders knew what they wanted. This illustrated a degree of political maturity and comprehension of constitutional affairs. Our Constitution was hailed as a model for Africa, if not the world, and it surpasses some constitutions of the West in terms of its guarantees of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms as encapsulated in Chapter 3. After three months of diligence, the Constitution of the Republic of Namibia came into being and we should be reminded that this was a consensual piece of legislation. The late Jannie de Wet and his party were opposed to Article 23 which links apartheid and affirmative action and he reaffirmed his objection to that article in his statement during the adoption of the Constitution on February 9, 1990 on the steps of the Tintenpalast. I wrote this article to remind my fellow countrymen and women of the importance of Constitution Day, because I haven’t heard discussions at street corners or in the corridors of government offices about the significance of this day. I hope the Office of the Prime Minister will table a bill in Parliament this year to proclaim this day a public holiday in order to give due recognition to our leaders who engineered this democratic piece of legislation. Our institutions of higher learning should organise public lectures on our Constitution on this day; even schools can go the extra mile by organising debates on the relevance of some provisions of the Constitution today, 24 years after independence. KAIKAKUA MBAHA KAENDO