Am I reading Ndulamo Morima's analysis of Presidential terms correctly?

In the WeekendPost weekly newspaper (February 24 - March ?) the columnist Ndulamo Morima, a lawyer by profession and a constitutional specialist of note, posed the question "Do our presidents retire or they resign?" I am not a lawyer. Morima went to great length to explain why in his view our presidents retire, rather than resign.

I read Morima's analysis, partly with the hope that I could find definitive proof that our constitution demands that the President serves ONLY two terms as is often touted by those who claim that we have an excellent constitution. From Morima's article I failed to find any such definitive proof. I am not faulting Morima. His article never set out to provide any such proof.

What I think I found however, is proof that the constitution is cleverly crafted to grant the President an indefinite term of office. The President has to leave office after the ten year "aggregate" period OR after Parliament is dissolved and the next President is elected and ready to assume office.

But it seems to me that there is nothing preventing the incumbent from being THAT next President again! In other words, Morima has established that President Khama can constitutionally remain in office until the next general election in 2019. It seems to me that if his party wins an absolute majority, with or without Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) help, his party can (through Parliament) elect him for another ten year term, and another, and another....

I am not on social media, so if this matter has already been clarified on such, I beg everybody's pardon. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Our tribes and totems

When the gods genetically re-engineered man, they allocated man to work-groups which we call tribes/nations today. Man was insulated from the political alignments of the gods. Man was just a worker who had to be protected from being swamped by Homo Naledi.Such was the community that lived on and around Mapungubwe hill. Some guards (Balindi/Balete) were placed at the top of the hill, while others were deployed at the bottom. The principal responsibility of the guards on the hill-top was to drop (ku liga) rocks on any enemy who might have breached the lower defences. Consequently the hill-top guards became known as "the droppers" (Baka Chiliga) [Boo Seleka in Setswana] Totems were assigned by the gods mostly to differentiate one work-group from another, but also to give humanity the upper hand in the survival stakes vis-a-vis Homo Naledi. The totems were mostly in the form of some animal that the assigned group was not allowed to eat or even touch. In the human survival sta...
Read more

Strange things in this world

Palestine/Israel:   The architects of Apartheid in South Africa insisted that they were implementing an "n" state solution where "n" is the number of independent states. Their "n" was composed of such Bantustans as BophutaTswana, Transkei, Ciskei, KwaZulu etc. We (rightly) vilified them and fought to destroy their unacceptable designs in our continent. Many people died in the process. Today people are advocating for the creation of another "n" state solution with "n=2" in Palestine/Israel. They call it a 2 state solution. Hendrick Vervoed must be dancing in his grave! Botswana: UDC vs IEC I listened to part of the judgement reading. An interesting point made was that if the UDC were granted the right to observe the voter registration, then other political actors (presumably, BDP, BCP etc) would also be so granted. Now this is strange, because the government insists that ONLY the 94 or so Basarwa who sued and won the right to stay in the...
Read more

What's wrong with Botswana cartoonists?

I mean here is a guy, on the eve of his becoming president, and he comes wearing the most ridiculous looking cap bedecked with medals; an absolute cartoonists paradise, surpassed if at all, only by Jean Bedell Bokasa's coat! And guess what, it's been two months now that he has been making decisions affecting all our lives, and not one cartoon of him wearing that ridiculous hat has appeared in the mainline press. All we get are almost exact replicas of his photoshoots, or selfies as they are called nowadays! Come on guys what do you think we live in - a Banana republic or what?
Read more