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Walter Nyamukondiwa

Kariba Bureau

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) is now looking at benchmarking its election management with international standards after successfully implementing the domestic and regional standards in the 2018 harmonised elections.

Zimbabwe was adjudged to have held its harmonised elections in line with the SADC Guidelines on Elections and also got a positive review from the African Union (AU) observer mission. With the country headed for the 2023 elections, the electoral management body says preparations including the ongoing voter registration, are underway.

ZEC chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba this week said the electoral management body was operating according to the Constitution and Electoral Act.

She said this at a workshop in Kariba which brought together managers of commercial, public, community and campus radio stations to engender women’s participation in politics.

Any changes to its mandate and functions, she said, were supposed to be done through the country’s political process including Parliament and not ZEC as it was just an administrative body.

Justice Chigumba said ZEC had become a scapegoat for political parties and individuals that failed to push electoral reforms in Parliament to the satisfaction of their constituencies.

“Our role ends at forwarding recommendations and thereafter it is the role of politicians, those in Government, those in Cabinet and those who are in Parliament,” she said.

“They should sponsor Private Members’ Bills for some of these reforms they want. They find that, like what others say, democracy is the tyranny of the majority. So the majority of those in parliament might not be embodying some of the reforms. They fail to get joy in Parliament and there is no movement in Parliament. They turn to the Soft underbelly, the low hanging fruit, which is ZEC.”

She said electoral reforms were ongoing and political parties should aspire to have a majority in Parliament so that they could effect changes to the law.

Justice Chigumba said ZEC had forwarded all the recommendations from SADC, AU, individuals and other observers of the 2018 Harmonised Elections to Government through an Inter-Ministerial Taskforce.

She said assertions that ZEC was not implementing electoral reforms was misguided or aimed at misleading the public as procedures for pushing through the reforms are known.

“How can an electoral management body whose job is to buy ballot paper, print it and put it in polling stations change laws? How can we change the laws of the country? You know where the laws are reformed,” she said.

Justice Chigumba said indications were that the census would be held in April followed by the delimitation exercise in August, 2022 paving way for the blitz voter registration exercise.

She said ZEC was contemplating allowing people with the green waiting pass to register to vote as a way of accommodating first time voters.

“We had set dates when we started deploying mobile registration, we then realised that there were a lot of people who needed identity cards,” she said.