In its quest to achieve a people-driven Constitution, Zambia is to hold a national referendum as part of next year’s tripartite elections during which the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) and President Edgar Lungu will be seeking a fresh mandate.
But does the ordinary man in the street really understand what a referendum means?
The Collins English Dictionary defines a referendum as, ‘A direct vote by all the people of a country or area to decide on a political matter about which there is strong disagreement’.
From this definition, it is clear that unless ‘ALL’ the people turn out in large numbers in support of the proposed constitutional changes on polling day, the referendum will be rendered useless and a waste of time and financial resources. So it is on this basis that governments would not want to sacrifice limited resources on an exercise whose effectiveness is dependent on the number of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ votes cast.
Most impartial observers would agree that it is a reasonable approach to a complex issue on the part of Government because an overwhelming voter-turnout is something that no one can guarantee with any degree of certainty.
Aware of the danger posed by voter-apathy, the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) has mounted a spirited voter-registration campaign in an effort to ensure a huge voter-turnout at the polls. Similarly political parties and other stakeholders too should roll up their sleeves and help educate the masses on the importance of registering and voting if the referendum is to achieve its intended purpose.
Zambia has held two referendums before.  The first one was held in 1969 and the second one in 1973. The ruling party was very popular then and people flocked en masse to their respective polling stations across the country.
I was among the thousands who registered at Ndola’s Peter Singogo Police Camp in 1968 for the 1969 referendum. At that time people were being asked (literally) to say ‘Yes’ to the ‘nationalisation’ of the copper mines in the wake of the historic 1968 Mulungushi Economic Reforms announced by President Kenneth Kaunda in Kabwe.
The other objective of the exercise was to ‘legitimise’ the termination by Dr Kaunda’s administration of British South Africa Company’s (BSAC) mineral royalties. Researchers commissioned by the in-coming Government to investigate company operations revealed that through mineral royalties, Cecil John Rhodes’s BSAC had been ‘exacting more than a pound of flesh’ from Northern Rhodesia since 1924 when it was granted the authority to run the country by the British government.
As indicated earlier, the second referendum (which will be remembered notably for its boycott by two eminent pre-independence heroes in Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula and Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe and their supporters) followed four years later.
Eager to introduce a one-party State, as a way to contain the rising political temperature in the country, the ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP) got down to serious business to achieve its objective.
Unfortunately, I did not vote in the 1973 referendum partly because I had just returned home from Nigeria for which I received a ‘tongue-lashing’ by a top UNIP youth league leader and tribal cousin (name withheld as he is late). The incident happened outside what used to be Parthenon grocer’s shop in Ndola’s President Avenue.
Apparently, the party militants, who were not particularly well liked because of their disregard for the rule of law, had taken it upon themselves to mount pickets at various strategic points in the central business district (CBD), stopping and demanding to know from every commuter or shopper if they had voted ‘Yes’ by showing that their right-thumb had been dipped in that unmistakable and indelible red ink.  It was a hair-raising experience for the law abiding citizen and expatriate resident.
Some 42 years later I am still unsure whether most people especially the ordinary voter at that time fully understood the implications of what they had been asked to endorse. But people had voted all the same; and those who probably on principle chose to ‘abstain’ paid in various ways for their ‘intransigence’.
As regards next year’s referendum, government has explained why it cannot be held any earlier than that, saying that given the falling prices of copper – the principal foreign exchange earner for the country, the State would rather spend the limited financial resources at its disposal on improving people’s living standards than on an expensive exercise that would only serve to please interest groups ‘agitating’ for sweeping constitutional changes.
To rationalise the process, therefore, the Government has said apart from the Bill of  Rights, the non-contentious issues in the Draft Constitution, including dual citizenship, are to be taken to the National Assembly so Members of Parliament (MPs), as elected representatives of the people, can in a spirit of give-and-take reach consensus on most of them ahead of the balloting tentatively set for August 2016.
Referendums would seem to be a new phenomenon to the vast majority in most Third World countries, including Zambia but in developed democracies with much financial muscle, referendums have been used extensively to either introduce new legislation or resolve controversial policy matters.
In France, for instance, former French president Charles de Gaulle often resorted to using the referendum particularly after he founded his own party in 1947 to effect constitutional amendments, major legislation and international treaties.
General de Gaulle believed that crucial changes could not be effected without the consent of the governed, saying, ‘In France the Supreme Court is the people’.
In case of a constitutional deadlock or when parliament lacked a majority, he is famously quoted as saying, ‘One should ask the people to decide. That would be a truly functioning democracy’.
According to Ehrmann (Politics in France) between 1793 and 1969 the French electorate has been convened 16 times to vote in a national referendum, but not all of them achieved the intended purposes.
In 1958, under de Gaulle, a vote against the new constitution might have brought France back to civil war which it had narrowly escaped a few months earlier. Forty per cent of the general electorate declared they reached their decision on the constitutional project on the basis of its intrinsic values, 41 per cent because of the personality of General de Gaulle himself.
Once he considered the results of the referendum sufficient to continue in office, his newly introduced system of electing a president – enjoyed ever-increasing favour with the electorate, says Ehrmann.
De Gaulle is said to have also reaffirmed his resolve that he would continue to use the referendum as an appropriate method of letting the electorate ‘determine directly’ such problems as are considered essential.
Unsurprisingly his preference for the referendum, as an instrument of direct democracy, was shared by an important segment of public opinion.
Ehrmann says in 1962 and again in 1969 only a few weeks before a majority of ‘No’ votes in another referendum was to bring about de Gaulle’s resignation, 51 per cent of the respondents in a public opinion poll favoured the direct consultation of the electorate. Only 24 per cent in 1962 and 27 per cent in 1969 were opposed to it.
However, the French leader’s plan to use the referendum to resolve the Algerian independence crisis and in May 1968 to end student unrest and work stoppages by striking workers across the country, nearly suffered a major setback.
But with the prompting probably by his Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, Gen de Gaulle, who died in Paris in 1970, announced in a special broadcast to the nation that government was abandoning the referendum plan and instead was ‘dissolving the National Assembly and calling for new elections’.
The move turned out to be ‘a masterful tactical stroke’ in the sense that instead of crystallising opposition against the referendum, government forced the major political forces to ‘muster their strength’ in a traditional electoral contest.
By promising law and order and brandishing the threat of ‘totalitarian communism’ (as practised in the Soviet Union and China) the Gaullist party and its allies won their greatest electoral victory yet. However, the outcome was unsatisfactory for de Gaulle who still held the view that parliamentary elections confirmed only “indirectly and temporarily” what he liked to call his own profound legitimacy.
Gen de Gaulle’s argument (which I think should be of particular interest to the Zambian electorate who will be voting in next year’s referendum/general election) was that parliamentary elections did little to strengthen the ‘privileged’ bond that united the leader and the people who had elected him.
Under the Draft Constitution of Zambia, if endorsed by Parliament, the current traditional ‘first-past-the-post’ rule will not apply in future elections because the ultimate winner of a presidential contest will be required under Article 47 (1) to score more than 50 per cent of the total votes cast.
According to the Constitution of Zambia (Amendment Bill) published in the Times of Zambia of August 10, 2015, if at the initial ballot a presidential candidate does not receive more than 50 per cent plus one (50+1) of the valid votes cast, a second ballot shall be held within 37 days of the initial ballot, where the only candidates shall be the presidential candidates who obtained:
The highest and second highest numbers of valid votes cast in the initial ballot, or;
An equal number of valid votes cast in the initial ballot, being the highest votes among the presidential candidates that stood for election to the office of President.
A person may within seven days of the declaration made under Clause (2 ), petition the Constitutional Court to nullify the election of a presidential candidate who took part in the initial ballot on the grounds that the person was not validly elected; or a provision of this Constitution or other law relating to the presidential election was not complied with.
A presidential candidate who obtains the majority of the valid votes cast in the second ballot shall be declared President-elect and a decision of the decision of the Constitutional Court made in accordance with Clause Six (6) is final.
To the layman’s point of view the entire process sounds too long and complex and former French president Gen Charles de Gaulle’s ‘Supreme Court’ of the country – in our context the Zambian people – instead of the Court of Appeal, etc, may have to be called upon once more to break the deadlock in a direct though costly referendum.
But the question is: who pays because all these processes involve money and other resources?
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