So Why Does the Constitution Matter?
Here in the UK we are in the midst of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II and when I say celebrating I mean just that. Over a 4-day long holiday, we have seen pageants, concerts, parades, church services, fly-pasts, and street parties. The outpouring of affection for the Queen goes beyond mere respect for managing to hold on for 60 years, it is a deep expression of gratitude for her unstinting devotion to duty, for providing the nation with a moral and spiritual center, for representing and, above all, for being the safe and unstinting custodian of the values the nation holds dear.
There is a similarity between our ruler and the Queen in that the length of the Queen’s reign (60 years) means that most of the population in the UK has known no other Sovereign. This proportion is, given our mortality rates, more or less matched by Museveni’s 26 years in power. However, here are two other similar figures, which tell a very different story. A recent poll in Uganda found that 80% of the population was unhappy with the rule of Museveni. In contrast, a poll in the UK found that over 80% of the nation wanted the monarchy to continue. So what makes the difference?
There may be many answers to that question but here is the one that makes most sense to me: The monarch is the custodian of the values that the British hold most dear: Freedom and the Rule of Law. Whilst the United Kingdom has no written constitution it does have an unwritten one, whose roots stretch back to the Magna Carta in 1215 (and beyond). Almost 800 years of tradition and values at whose core was the Rule of Law (as opposed to the arbitrary rule of men). Lord Denning, one of the moat preeminent jurists ever, described the Magna Carta as “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”. That core value has been at the heart of almost every subsequent constitutional struggle in the UK. It is after all why the English chopped off the head of King Charles I.
These values are also what Thomas Paine (the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, both of which had a huge influence on the American and French Revolutions) sought in the New World. It is therefore no surprise that if you go to the United States today the Constitution is talked about in the same reverential tones as the Queen. The US Constitution is, explicitly, the custodian of the values that that nation holds dear, once again at the core of which are the freedom of the individual and the adherence to the Rule of Law.
The mistake we have made and are making in Uganda is to believe that it is the identity of the ruler who is paramount. The truth of the matter is that that no single individual is more important than the values we hold dear and want to govern our lives. The Queen may be personally popular, but that by itself could never explain why a nation is prepared to place so much faith in the institution she represents - they do so because they know it is the place where their values reside, just as in the United States it is the Constitution.
So if we want to free ourselves from tyranny, if we want to live in a country where the Rule of Law is paramount, where we are free from the arbitrary authority of the despot, we need to start to start to stop investing our hope in and granting all power to men. We need to start focusing on investing and building up the power of our very own Constitution.
The British monarch would be no more than an 85 year-old woman, without all that has been invested in the monarchy. The US Constitution would be nothing more than a piece of paper, without all that has been invested in it. After 800 and 250 years respectively, each has come to symbolise the core values of Freedom and the Rule of Law.
I do not know how long it will take for our Constitution to get to that place and certainly hope it does not take anywhere near as long. However, what I do know is that until we begin to acknowledge that the Constitution is the foundation of our freedom, until we begin to act as if it is, we will never get there. As Thomas Paine said: “the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”
So today make a start, find a copy of our Constitution (try http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/details.jsp?id=5235), read it, study it, encourage your friends, colleagues and relatives to do the same. Acknowledge that our Constitution matters, begin the process of investing our Constitution with the power it deserves and we want it to have, in the knowledge that if you do not do so, we will continue to remain at the whim of the arbitrary despot. And if we do we will have no one to blame but ourselves.