PLENARY SESSION - COMMONWEALTH MATTERS
A Member participating in the Plenary session
should be to practise tolerance, respect and understanding among Commonwealth members. The interpretation should be based on both the political and economic implications of the Charter.
To this end, I wish to suggest that the best way to meet the political development challenges is, among other things, to give fair and full rights of small and vulnerable countries, particularly with regard to their democratic rights. Big countries should refrain from making decisions for them, and therefore calling for a new culture of tolerance, respect and understanding. Further, to emancipate the participation of women in the democratic process in big and small states, clear affirmative action should be used to allow more women to obtain political leadership positions. To prepare the youth for meaningful future leadership in developed and developing countries, more resources and training should be enshrined in educational curricula and constitutions. To ameliorate the welfare of migrant workers across the
Commonwealth, legal consultations on immigration should be made to reduce the inhumane handling of job seekers across borders. To involve opposition and minority political parties in national development, governments should evolve consultative mechanisms to reduce political tension. This would include embracing ideas from religious, secular, civil society and other groups to defuse tension and violence, steps that call for full tolerance, respect and understanding.
While the Commonwealth parliamentary community has started working on these democratic processes for development, we still have a long way to go, considering, for example, that this conference has a relatively small female representation. This therefore calls for change at the source of our democratic processes which, in turn, show that our political structures still need a higher degree of tolerance, respect and understanding. The second aspect of the future interpretation and use of the Commonwealth Charter is economic.
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Delegates may wish to consider that there are currently many incidences of conflict and violence in the world that are by and large caused by prevailing economic deprivation of millions of people. Again, as Nelson Mandela told South African Parliamentarians more than a decade ago, development must be measured through the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunity and power in our societies.
This means that while we often read of annual national and global economic growth indexes, there are millions of people who still languish in extreme poverty because economic benefits do not sufficiently trickle down to them. The expectation is that Commonwealth Parliamentarians have a duty to keep the economic inequity agenda active. To achieve equitable distribution of wealth at national and Commonwealth levels, again, requires tolerance, respect and understanding.
I wish to note that those Commonwealth nations, small or large, which, for example, have taken
minimal steps to avail land and other resources to ordinary citizens, run the risk of future conflict. I believe that Commonwealth Parliamentarians should continue to champion the fair distribution of the benefits from the natural resources of small and large states.
Contemporary political and economic experience shows that the economic model of reckless capitalism breeds conflict, because it lacks not only fairness, but tolerance, respect and understanding to benefit the ordinary citizen.
To address the interests of the citizens of the Commonwealth through their Parliaments, the Association has been tireless in formulating programmes and activities to reform and strengthen the capacity of parliament as an institution and parliamentarians and their staff as democratic and economic players. In the CPA centenary celebration in London two years ago, I informed you, Distinguished Delegates, how over the years the Association had contributed to shaping emerging
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