In our opening chapter, we quoted the words of the Harare Commonwealth Declaration, enjoining the practice of good governance and democracy upon the members of the Commonwealth, eleven of which fall into our eastern and southern African grouping. What lessons can be learned from the study undertaken in this book of the elements of constitutional governance in this regional setting? Underlying this study is the notion that good government in a democratic context is an essential prerequisite of development. This now appears to have acquired the status of received wisdom, although, as Patrick Chabal reminds us, the lesson of East Asia is that democracy is the outcome of, and not the precondition for, economic development.

Constitutions do matter: the problem of constitutionalism

R. H. Green's remark that ‘many African constitutions are simply irrelevant’ reflects in a stark fashion the hardly controversial proposition that merely studying the constitutional texts may tell us very little about the realities of the political order which governs the daily life of citizens. Writing nearly forty years ago, Stanley de Smith, one of the founding fathers of Commonwealth constitutional scholarship conceded that: