By DARLINGTON CHILUBA
THE notion of a social contract arises as a means of answering one of the most important questions which is: Who does government really represent?
Where does government draw the mandate to represent the nation and where is the evidence of consent from the people? Dictatorships and monarchs answer all these questions by masking their own needs as national needs thereby presenting themselves as the final answer to these questions.
Logically, however, a contract is not a document that imposes the will of one upon many others, especially in a social or national setting. A contract is designed to be consensual at the very least.
More than just a document, it is a guarantee that those with expectations have the indisputable right to withdraw their confidence if their expectations are not met.
Conversely, those entrusted with the mandate to achieve certain outcomes on behalf of others are granted every opportunity to do so objectively. A social contract can be simplified as a binding understanding that establishes obligations, expectations and consequences of performance or non-performance between and among vested parties
Representative politics more accurately attempts to operate as a reciprocal system to various competing needs of a nation. It proposes that people of a given area, ward or constituency are better represented by one of their own.
For instance, the Councillor, Mayor or Member of Parliament will be known to – and familiar with – their given electorate so that voters are not confronted with the option of voting for a stranger. In other words, people will vote for a familiar individual whose leadership agenda will respond to the electorate.
The representative is given the mandate by the people through electoral consent. That consent is obtained by agreeing with the electorate on what must be achieved within the electoral cycle or lifetime of that constituency.
The mandate can take the form of a manifesto wherein those seeking elected office seek consent by detailing what they believe to be achievable during their tenure of office.
The manifesto, however, is not a legally binding document for all citizens. It is for the party in office and its supporters. The opposition will not be bound by that manifesto and will earn their right to criticise it without necessarily breaking the law.
This is the nature of representative or participatory politics. It values and promotes divergent opinions so that even those in the minority are not isolated because of holding divergent beliefs. Admittedly, a manifesto is indeed a social contract between the elected and their constituents, but it is not one consented to by all citizens.
That being the case, it is only natural that a greater document binding all citizens to a unified ultimate purpose be created. A document not bound by, nor restricted to electoral cycles, but leans strongly on the continuity of the state and its people.
That overarching document is the Constitution. This is the ultimate document of inevitable consequence for the voter and those elected. It is the quintessential guarantor of vested interests and qualifies as an appropriate social contract.
It transfers power to elected officials for a given period to provide their mandate some justifiable action and legal comfort.
Article 260 of Zambian law which deals with Oath of office and Prescribed Oaths establishes the point at which those who work for the people are held accountable by the constitution and to what extent.
More accurately, Chapter 5 of the laws of Zambia known as The Official Oaths Act sets out a schedule of the high offices for which oaths must be taken. These are Oath of President, of Vice-President, of the Minister or Deputy Minister, the Speaker of the National Assembly and the Judicial oath.
All of these are obviously high and important offices but only one oath, the Presidential oath has the following words – “…having been constitutionally elected/re-elected…”. The rest of the oaths carry the word “appointed” (or nominated), meaning the absence of a direct link to the voters, or more crudely, the citizens.
This important point fundamentally separates the presidency from all other offices in that the transient incumbent is made personally responsible to the people, on oath.
Not only is the incumbent custodian of the constitution but also the personification of public interest. This is where the nation and its matters take precedence over partisan and other sectarian issues.
The presidency, as anchored in the constitution, is a unifier. Failure in this high office can have lasting ramifications which can spew into the judiciary and legislature – after all, these are appointees of public interest who swear allegiance to the President.
If a president is sectarian or has proclivity towards their own political party than the nation, failure is inevitable.
If, for example, the sitting president makes an accusation against another citizen, least of all in parliament, as it has happened before, the law has a weakness of taking the president’s word as truth and the legislature and judiciary can be made conduits or accomplices to such accusations.
This is a historically observable trend and weakness which the judiciary and legislature are yet to overcome. Implicitly, the President therefore holds the responsibility to uphold the implied conditions of the Social Contract with a view to represent the interests of all citizens regardless of their political affiliation, creed or colour.
