Source: Since We Are Already Amending, Let’s Dump The Dumb Shit In Our Constitution – Zealous Thierry
Zimbabwe is amending its constitution. Parliament has confirmed it and governing party ZANU-PF has the numbers to make it happen. The public hearings on this issue lasted less than a week across a country of 15 million people, which works out to roughly one hour of democracy per province if you are being generous with the arithmetic. We are doing this since the amendment is happening anyway.Fine. Since we are already in the document, pencils out, let us talk about the section nobody wanted to discuss when they were writing it back in 2013.Section 91(1)(b) of the Zimbabwe Constitution states that a person qualifies for election as President only if they have attained the age of forty years. Forty is the floor, however there is no ceiling. The man who signed that into law in 2013 was 89 years old at the time. I do not think, for the love of God that this was an oversight of legislative drafting. It was a political document expressing a political reality about who was expected to hold power and for how long. They, the people with power, wrote the floor that protected their position from those below, the people without power. They omitted the ceiling that would have threatened it from above. You see, putting a floor disadvantages powerless folks like you and I while putting a ceiling tries to take away power from people who already have it. You write the constitution you need, that’s the one rule of staying in power. This is the constitution we got.Here is what the current constitution does not tell you. Zimbabwe’s life expectancy at birth is 62.41 years, while median age of death for Zimbabwean men is 65.9. Statistically speaking, this means that more than half of all Zimbabwean men are dead before they reach 66. The minimum age to run for president is 40. There is no maximum.A man can, constitutionally, hold the presidency until he dies in office of old age and yet the document will have nothing to say about it. It has nothing to say about cognitive fitness either. There is neither a medical requirement nor a physical assessment required at any age.A president can qualify for a first term at say 70 and hold the office for 10 years soon to be 14, with the constitution’s full blessing regardless of what is happening in their prefrontal cortex where all the decisions get made.The peer-reviewed research on this is not ambiguous at all. Executive function shows measurable decline beginning at age 60. Sixty-seven percent of people over 70 experience some form of cognitive decline. A paper published in an economics journal, titled without irony “No Country for Old Men,” found that older leaders produce worse economic outcomes, more international conflict and shorter policy time horizons than younger leaders. This is not my opinion at all, but findings from independent research teams across multiple decades of data from multiple countries. The research says old leaders perform worse. The constitution of Zimbabwe has no upper age limit. These two facts share a country. Nobody responsible for drafting the constitution appears to have looked at this at the time.Now consider who Zimbabwe actually is. Our population is approx16.9 million and the median age is 19.2 years. Approximately sixty-two percent of Zimbabweans are under the age of 25.The median Zimbabwean is not 40, 50 or 60. More than half the country is younger than 20 year. Meanwhile everyone 18 and older can vote and none under 40 can run for the highest office. The majority of Zimbabwe’s citizens can participate in electing a president but are constitutionally ineligible to be one, not because of any demonstrated incapacity, but because the number 40 was written into a document negotiated primarily by people who were not 40 and had no interest in writing a document that excluded them from anything.The country that will live longest inside the consequences of today’s decisions has a median age of 19.2. The constitution requires the people making those decisions to be at least 40. The gap between those two numbers is not a technicality. It is the age of the problem as I wrote about earlier this month in the Journal of Sustainability.President Emmerson Mnangagwa was born on September 15, 1942 and he is 83 currently. Zimbabwe’s life expectancy for men specifically is 60.23 years while the median age of death for Zimbabwean men is 65.9. The president of Zimbabwe has outlived the statistical expectation for a man of his country by approximately 17 to 22 years. He is governing a nation where most men his age are already dead. His band of conspirators are proposing to extend his time doing so by two more years. The constitutional amendment does not mention this arithmetic at all. Instead it mentions policy continuity and development programmes to be implemented to completion, development programmmes Mr Mnangagwa failed to see to fruition in the last 8 years.There is a political science concept called strategic gerontocracy. The research on it found that in systems where leaders cannot easily be removed, the inner circle sometimes selects old leaders specifically because old leaders are expected to die sooner. An elderly leader is a compromise. The idea is, you get the presidency and we in turn get the biological certainty that it will not last forever. The Constitutional Amendment Bill, 2026, which extends the current 83-year-old president’s term by two years, disrupts even this grim actuarial bargain. It adds time to a tenure that biology was already limiting. This current amendment is nothing but a renegotiation with death.The world has tried young leaders before. William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister of Britain at 24 and served for 18 years.Theodore Roosevelt took office at 42 and built the Panama Canal.Gabriel Boric became Chile’s president at 35.Emmanuel Macron won France at 39. Ibrahim Traore took office at 34.Jean-Claude Duvalier led Haiti at 19 and won 2 referendums.Bassirou Diomaye Faye became Senegal’s president at 44, walked out of prison into the presidency in ten days and is widely regarded as among the continent’s most reform-minded leaders.These were, and are functioning governments. None of them appear in the research literature on leaders who produce worse economic outcomes than the ones before them. That literature is populated, overwhelmingly, by a different age bracket.The continent with the youngest population on earth is governed by some of the oldest leaders on earth. Three sitting African presidents were all simultaneously 83 years old recently. Paul Biya of Cameroon is 92 and seeking another term while the median age across sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 18 years. The people governing it are in their eighties and nineties.So here is the proposal. Since we are already in the constitution with our red pens, since the amendment train has left the station as ZANU-PF enablers say and we are apparently doing this: amend Section 91(1)(b). Lower the minimum presidential age from 40 to 21. Add a maximum of 45.My reasoning on this is not ideological at all but pure actuarial.A president elected at 45 who serves one seven-year term leaves office at 52. Based on Zimbabwe’s own life expectancy data, they will live inside the consequences of their presidency for approximately ten years after leaving office. A president elected at 21 will live inside those consequences for three decades. Both are substantially longer exposure periods than a president who enters at 83 and may not complete the term. The research is plain: the adverse effects of ageing are generally attributed to the shorter time horizons of elder leaders. Time horizon is a literal calculation of how many years a decision-maker expects to exist after making a decision.The objections are predictable. Young people lack experience. Experience is accumulated by doing, not by waiting. A 35-year-old who has spent 14 years in law, economics, civil society, or public service has experience. The question is whether it is relevant, not whether it is old.Voters will never elect a 21-year-old they will say. To that I retort, the proposal does not require them to. It requires the option to exist. France will one of the biggest economies in the world and therefore by extension, smarter people than us, allow 18 year Olds to run for the highest office.And finally, they will say that the upper limit of 45 is arbitrary. Every age limit in every constitution is arbitrary. The current minimum of 40 is arbitrary. The seven-year extension is arbitrary. The difference is that 45 is derived from Zimbabwe’s own mortality and cognitive data, rather than from the preferences of the people currently holding power.The 2013 Constitution was drafted primarily by people who were already well past any ceiling they might have written. They included the floor that protected them from below. They omitted the ceiling that would have constrained them from above. This was the predictable output of a drafting process controlled by the people who would lose most from a maximum age clause.We are now going to use that document to extend the term of an 83-year-old man by two additional years. We have done it in a country where the median citizen is 19 years old. We have done it through a hearing process that lasted four days. We have done it while dissolving the Gender Commission, stripping the military’s duty to uphold the constitution, and handing the voters’ roll to a presidential appointee.Since we are already amending: let us write the section the old geezers in 2013 chose not to write.A country should be governed by people who expect to live in it.Kumbirai Thierry Nhamo is an independent writer, social commentator and social justice activist. He can be contacted by email kumbiraithierryn@gmail.com Portfolio: https://muckrack.com/kumbirai-thierry-nhamo
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