allAfrica.com: Ghana: Commonwealth Ministers Meet - Real Opportunity or More Rhetoric (Page 1 of 2)

The next two weeks will see London abuzz with various foreign ministers and permanent representatives from across the Commonwealth coming to deliberate on what gets into the communiqués of the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Meeting this November (CHOGM).

The process of creating these communiqués is long drawn and organic. Issues bubble up from the earlier meetings of foreign, women's affairs, finance ministers and the like that take place in the two years between CHOGMs and also from the continuum of work developed from mandates given to the Commonwealth Secretariat by the Heads of State at earlier CHOGMS. Officials at the Commonwealth Secretariat gather together all these threads in draft paragraphs, which then get distilled by negotiations like the ones being held this week.

Past mandates have included promoting and mainstreaming women's rights into the work of the Secretariat, helping ensure better election practices, raising awareness of HIV/AIDs, leading on debt forgiveness, getting reports back on progress on the Millennium Development Goals and assisting with constitution making.

What the communiqués say decides future work at the Secretariat. A deal of this is concerned with providing technical assistance to countries that ask for it, raising awareness and too gently pushing unwilling governments to comply with membership obligations in the Fundamental Political Principles of the Commonwealth - founding documents which are very much based on being obedient to internationally agreed human rights standards.

After governments have indicated their priorities and current concerns a consensus document goes to the Heads of State at their biennial meeting for finalisation. Secretariat officials whose full time job this is, countries that contribute the most to the Commonwealth's coffers, the host country - this time Uganda - and the more populous nations like India and Nigeria make the running.

Since the Commonwealth is not on everyone's political front burner as the most influential of multilateral associations, many officials that go to its meetings are often not properly briefed and, but for a handful, civil society ignores its deliberations: perhaps with good cause. Unfulfilled promises enthusiastically made by Heads of Government lie scattered like the paper hats, torn streamers and used paper napkins after some annual lodge bash for the sad janitor to clear up into the dustbin without a trace till the next jolly occasion comes around.

Nevertheless, the potential for taking real action still makes the Commonwealth's meetings a party worth attending in the hope that some, at least, of the promise will be realised. Last time around Mugabe's nervousness at being named and shamed for his terrible overlordship of 12 million of his countrymen forced him to pre-empt censure by pulling out of the association rather than face the discredit of being suspended.

This time around, prior to the November meet General Musharraf, will be careful to doff his general's uniform as promised for something at least that looks like the fig leaf of democratic functioning - even if Fiji, Maldives and Bangladesh hang on to their coloured exercises in democratic governance.

Because the Commonwealth works like a club of leaders acting through consensus it is in fact a very safe space for officials and governments to go beyond the posturing and really get to grips with the issues of the day. Barring a handful of very affluent countries the Commonwealth is essentially an association of grindingly poor countries where well over half the population of near 1.4 billion lives on less than $2 a day.

These people need real solutions and not rhetoric. The people all know what's wrong. One of the big things that are wrong in most Commonwealth countries is policing. Every year very few nations from Antigua to Zambia - and all the other letters of the alphabet in between - escape the ignominy of being cited for abusive, violent, discriminatory and corrupt policing. Millions experience it everyday.

They all know that most police forces need a total overhaul. Governments know how to do it: re-order policing; re-examine how it is actually done on the ground; make recruitment fair, training better, management result oriented, provide reasonable resources, and be strong in monitoring performance and punishing the guilty.

This is one side of it, but the most important bit of the improvement project is to make police more accountable to law and less subservient, less obsequious to those momentarily in power and to create systems where the policy is laid down by government and operational responsibility for ensuring the safety and security of the population at large is in the hands of the police leadership. In other words, re-envision police establishments so that they run like essential services for the population much like a fire service or the post office and not like the coercive force of some foreign power.

That old way of policing belongs to colonial times. It should not be the way our democratic governments use police. Keeping to those past values and systems is an admission of our inability to be free from the worst influences of that time and to shame ourselves as sovereign nations.

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