Bloody Bmd Congress, A Reminder To Craft A Balanced Constitution

Correspondent | Wednesday July 19, 2017 11:15

My thesis is this; There are generally two forms of parties in BW. The first group is those whose constitutions centralize power in its president. These are the BDP and the BNF.

The second group is those parties whose constitutions have emasculated the presidency by stripping it of its powers and conferred power in the NEC. This space is occupied by the BCP and the BMD. Furthermore, the constitution of the republic puts all executive powers in the Presidency such that the most powerful person in BW is the President.

He can laterally singlehandedly run this country to wherever he wants, once elected into office. Now, both the BDP and the BNF split primarily on account of concentration of power in the Presidency and gave birth to the BMD and the BCP respectively.

Given their experiences on the dangers of concentrating power in one man, both the BMD and the BCP took deliberate and conscious decisions to come up with constitutions in which power is evenly distributed in NEC. The BMD blood shed has provided us with a serious underbelly of a weakened president.

The BMD has now split. The BCP has avoided this eventuality for over 20 years but the BMD crisis must send a clear message to the BCP to take preventative measures that what happened to BMD doesn’t happen to it. Now that we now have vivid and grotesque failures of the two sets of constitutions, what should be done?

Surely, there is a need to craft constitution that is mid way between these two extremes. It’s time the BCP moves to the centre in terms of power distribution and balance in the movement.

Furthermore, we should rethink our position of reducing the powers of the President of BW. A President without powers may quite easily lose the control of the party and country leading to catastrophe

Busang Manewe, via facebook