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At the end of President Amadou Toumani Touré's regime a constitutional review was planned, but the initiative was dropped.
Today, the current crisis Mali is facing is complex. It is at the same time a societal,
a political and institutional, and a security and military crisis.
As mentioned, it is a governance crisis which indeed puts into question the very ideal of the state's capabilities.
This state capability, its credibility is put into question. If one refers to several previous analyses,
to the mechanisms and procedures, to the actual process the state has used and uses today
to deal with the different crises at hand; one can realize that the state is confronted with many challenges :
its own capacity to govern the country, and even the question of its credibility and legitimacy.
If we want to overcome these huge challenges, we must first re-examine our constitution.
What does this mean? To see how our constitution can allow
the establishment of safeguards; to allow it to genuinely define the functionality of the state
Rereading the Constitution as a means to settle the crisis in Mali is possible.
In my opinion, it should take into account three dimensions that seem very essential
A review of the Malian constitution must first examine the mode of governance.
It must include a number of governance principles which will be constraining for the leaders,
but will enable them to respect the minimum requirements when it comes to public governance,
accountability, communication, and transparency in the management of public affairs.
These principles already exist, but they are not enough put into practice in the governance process.
So for me, the constitution must reframe public governance through these principles.
The second point is that the constitution, the new constitution, should also - if it comes into being -
focus on the issues of political representation. In the sense that it must re-examine
the electoral process itself. That is to say, how can the constitution ensure that leaders
who stem from the electoral processes are genuinely legitimate and independent.
Elected officials, for example the parliamentarians of the National Assembly,
have functioned more as people being on the payroll of those in power.
It was the case during the reform of the Family Code during which we really saw the role
played by the National Assembly was not one motivated by the needs of the people.
Many major nation-wide issues arose for which elected officials have really not been
able to provide suitable answers or represent the aspirations of the population.
And thirdly, probably should have been prior to the first, is the issue of the electoral architecture itself.
Yes, the former reform project had more or less covered this, but it is important to review
the electoral system by taking into account all the institutions in charge of organizing the elections,
and make sure that the entire electoral engineering apparatus in place can reflect
our financial resources, our methods and means, and our values.
And also allow that the consequence of this electoral engineering can be, as I was saying earlier,
the attainment of a political representation that is the image of the people.
And the last point which seems very relevant, especially in light of the current crisis, is reorganizing the army.
There is today an immense amount of work to do on our military. How to enable the emergence
of a truly republican army whose mission is to ensure the integrity of our territory,
protect the political and constitutional institutions, and above all place itself outside the political game.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community