EDITORIAL: What are we?

IF one is to judge from her recent utterances, our honourable Prime Minister is clearly preoccupied with having citizens discover the best of “who we are” and acting accordingly. This injunction echoes that of former Prime Minister who once inquired of the citizenry as to the precise nature of their individual mirror image.

However, ever since the announcement in the recent Throne Speech that it is proposed to replace the English monarch as our Head of state or, as it has been put in the popular domain, to become a republic, the question might beg asking, “What exactly are we, constitutionally?”

The simplistic distinction is between a monarchy and a republic. On this basis, we are on the horns of a constitutional dilemma, since while we have all the features of a democratic republic, government by a sovereign parliament of representatives periodically elected by the people, and by a Cabinet selected by the Prime Minister, our headship of state is constitutionally located in a foreign monarch. To aver that this makes us a monarchy is less than analytical, as that monarch is by convention obligated to appoint a representative chosen by the Prime Minister, not to interfere personally in local matters, and we have no power to determine the line of succession for that monarch, this being firmly placed in the remit of the UK parliament.

Of course, this dilemma was created at our accession to independence in 1966 when we anomalously chose to retain the titular head of the very monarchy from whom we sought that status as our own head of state. To this day, our people have not been informed of the justification for this inherently contradictory step, although to be fair, it was a step taken before and after by others identically circumstanced. Was it perhaps a condition of the grant?

We may deduce therefore that the so-called change to republicanism needs involve, at a minimum, a change in the headship of our state from a monarch to a local citizen, although it will be difficult to convince those opposed to the change that this is a sufficient condition.

Many of these people will see the change as portending an autocratic consolidation of power by the governing administration, absent the nothing but fanciful supervisory and restraining power of the English monarchy.

To this extent, we should expect to see and approve the text of the Constitution that will regulate our future republican governance, a circumstance that mandates some form of referendum or, at least, popular consultation, if the reform is to be viewed as democratically legitimate. While it might be true to state that republicanism appears to have been agreed by both major political organisations that have formed the government over the last two decades, there has also been a woeful lack of detail as to the precise form this should take.

Constitutional imperatives such as the jurisdiction of the head of state, his or her selection or election, the separation of powers and the composition of Parliament are all ripe for popular discourse; and, in our view, far too fundamental to be left up to the governing administration of the day solely.

The legal revolution that will be engendered by this change ought to be a popular one, and not merely a coup.