Stop blaming Constitution, start electing right leaders

If the Constitution was a person, it would be a serial abuse victim. It has been fashionable for a while for South Africans who are unhappy with the state of society to blame the Constitution. The favoured attack is the claim that it was written to accommodate the saintly Nelson Mandela, not those who came after him. Those who say this rarely explain what they mean, but a little decoding reveals that they claim the Constitution gives the president huge powers that were safe in Madiba’s hands but not in those of Jacob Zuma.

Commentators who make this claim are usually impressed with their own cleverness; it is hard to see why. The president in our system is essentially a prime minister with some extra powers — he or she can be removed by a simple majority of MPs; in presidential systems the head of government can be removed only by a supermajority, usually after a trial.

Most other presidents do not need to contend with courts telling them who they can appoint to key positions.

Unlike heads of government in some countries, ours is not immune from prosecution. Nor can our president issue executive orders that bypass Parliament.

So, on what is this claim based? When we dig deeper, we find the alleged problem is that the president has some powers — to sign laws or make appointments — that many people would rather Zuma did not have.

But the problem is Zuma, not the powers. The Constitution was meant to check presidential power, not decide who could wield it. There are no powers our presidents enjoy that are unusual in other democracies.

It is not the Constitution framers but the commentators who want the document tailored to fit particular presidents. They would not complain if a president they admired wielded the powers – their real gripe seems to be that the Constitution was not tailored to ensure that only people they support could wield presidential powers.

The other popular attack is the claim that the Constitution enables those who were privileged under apartheid to hang on to their wealth and power. Those who make the claim are rarely asked exactly which clauses do this — when they are, they become vague or the property clause is mentioned. But besides the fact that this clause can be overridden, the critics cannot cite concrete examples in which the Constitutional Court has used the property clause to prevent change. Or cases where it has used any other clause to do this.

It is true that society has not changed nearly enough over the past two decades. But that is not because the government has been thwarted by the Constitution — it is because it decided not to challenge important patterns inherited from the past.

Since it has never been stopped by the Constitution from making any change it wanted, it would no doubt have acted in exactly the same way if the Constitution gave it total power.

Blaming the Constitution is just buck passing. It removes the need for serious thought on how we hold power to account or what is needed to make SA a place for all.

It is not the job of constitutions to ensure that we get the presidents or changes we want. It is their job to ensure we can hold power to account and claim the rights citizenship brings. Our problem has not been what the Constitution stops anyone doing. It is the failure of our politics to realise the potential it offers.

The answer lies in rethinking our politics, not the document that makes that politics possible.