Africa must shift focus from legislative to socializing values

In the quest for global peace and disarmament after the World Wars, a conscience pricked world, scarred by the catastrophic savagery and wanton destructiveness embarked on a vigorous wave of constitutional reviews in a bid to end the profligacy and constitutional disregard that had triggered both wars.

New International instruments were crafted and global organs formed to purposely ensure peace and restore human dignity. In as much as the world wars took center stage as the main triggers for reform, guilt around the African slave trade and colonialism also expressly informed reform emphasis.

Against this backdrop, the League of Nations, an intergovernmental organization was founded following the Paris Peace Conference that ended World War I on 10 January 1920.  Likewise, the British Commonwealth of Nations was formed following the Balfour Declaration at the 1926 Imperial Conference.

Though the League lasted 26 years, it failed in its primary mission of preventing another war, and was subsequently replaced by the United Nations on 20 April 1946. Two years later, on 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Declaration of Human Rights as a landmark document that best captured the objective spirit of the times with its charted appeals for constitutional compassion to individual citizens and marginalized groups by authorities.

Almost two decades later, in 1966, along the tide of independence struggles in Africa and the rising power of black consciousness movements in the United States of America, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as its two main Optional Protocols customized to inform the needs of the emergent times and to fortify the objectives of the mother instrument.

Arnold j. Zurcher, then a lecturer at New York university, and editor of the influential 1951 Working Papers entitled, Constitutions and Constitutional Trends since World War II, defined the preceding period thus, 'for at precisely the time when faith in written constitutions appeared to have reached its nadir, the world witnessed an outpouring of such documents that is without parallel. Not even the periods of most violent revolutionary upheaval, like those of 1789, 1850, or 1919, witnessed a greater number of efforts to reduce the basic concepts of national polity to written form.'

Yet the net results of the near century focus on legislative reforms shows something has obviously remained amiss. Even where legislative reforms have substantively enabled the establishment of homogeneous legal statutes and structures almost globally, triggered an astronomic rise of women into positions of leadership, and introduced constitutional checks and balances, the lack of socialized values as the main ingredient for social security stands out.

Socializing values is the way forward for reform processes in Africa. Values are soft ware social doctrines which include universal themes such as love, honor, dignity and integrity and can only be socialized as opposed to the hardware context of legislating reforms. From a figurative trajectory; values are the railroads upon which the armored vehicles of legislative reforms are supposed to run.

 

Socializing values also acknowledges the redefining metamorphosis world social constructs have undergone over the last century where the nature of human aggression too has transformed, moving from the physical to the psychological, from hardware to software.

Moreover, as the preliminary historical in look suggests, emphasis on legislative reforms was a European response to two of her most tragic experiences. This European experience explains the current interest of African nations in legislating bills of rights, land, judicial, electoral and executive power reform, as the broad legislative spots around which the world wars exploded.

Though these legislative aspects have influenced African political content and reform direction most profoundly since 1992, after the fall of the iron curtain in 1990, the world wars had in no way broken the strong social networks that characterized African communities, but had instead anchored them as the pan African context of independence struggles clearly illustrated.

Summarily, as African nations put great emphasis on legislative reform as the prescribed insurance for human dignity, we should remember that socialized values are actually the spiritual aphrodisiac Africa actually needs to achieve social security going forwards.

The writer is a researcher and elections expert