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Walter Nyamukondiwa Chinhoyi Bureau
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission managed to successfully deploy personnel to hard to reach areas in Mashonaland West Province in time to commence the voter registration blitz. The areas include Lake stations such as Spurwing, King’s Camp and Gache Gache fishing camps.

In view of the challenging road network, deployment to areas such as Mola, Negande and Siakobvi was done on Monday. But some of the officials were deployed only yesterday morning following rains that pounded Kariba and Hurungwe districts. ZEC Mashonaland West acting provincial elections officer Mr Austin Ndlovu said registration and deployment has been done in the majority of centres.

“We are happy to report that we have managed to deploy people and the BVR kits to the majority of our centres. Only a few were deployed this morning (yesterday) after we halted deployment owing to the rains that fell in Kariba and Hurungwe districts,” said Mr Ndlovu.

A total of 320 BVR kits have been deployed for the first phase of the blitz voter registration programme covering Kariba and parts of Hurungwe District. The deployed personnel will handover to another team on October 26, which will cover the remainder of Hurungwe District, Makonde and parts of Zvimba District. Asked if there was any special arrangement for those in fishing camps, who were highly mobile, Mr Ndlovu said centres were established after realisation that most of those people had established permanent homes.

“In such areas as Gache Gache, we have had to establish centres because there are people, who have put up permanent settlements. There are, however, those who are mobile and that is why we have Lake stations such as Spurwing and King’s Camp,” he said.

Deployment to those centres, said Mr Ndlovu, was done successfully and people had already started registering to vote in the 2018 harmonised elections. Some of the people in Mashonaland West are making frantic efforts to get national identity documents to be able to register to vote.