Transparency and Public Involvement Key To Delimitation Exercise
By Lynette Manzini
Election watchdogs have advised the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to enhance transparency and public involvement in the delimitation exercise to ensure trust and credibility of the process ahead of the 2023 elections.
Although ZEC has released a delimitation road map that spells out the activities to be carried out, election watchdogs believe the commission’s communication leaves a lot to be desired.
Speaking during a Media Elections Academy on Electoral Process hosted by the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network (ZESN) in Kadoma last week, the Elections Resource Centre (ERC) Programs Manager Solomon Bobosibunhu said, ” ZEC is not transparent in their operations, we could not make sense of the delimitation road map they released. It is useless.”
In agreement, ZESN Senior Electoral Education and Capacity Building Officer Emma Chiseya said the delimitation road map was not detailed, adding that her organisation would continue to engage the electoral management body.
“The delimitation process should be as transparent and accessible to the public as possible.
“It is important to provide a means of public access to the delimitation process to promote awareness and demonstrate transparency.
“So far we don’t know where they are.
“We will monitor and continue to call upon ZEC to ensure that the process becomes transparent,” she said.
Chiseya added that when the process is transparent and accessible stakeholders such as political parties, Civic Society Organisations, the electorate, and others are more like to accept the outcome as opposed to an opaque and discriminatory process.
Delimitation is the process of redrawing wards and constituencies boundaries for electoral purposes to give them equal voting strength as much as possible.
According to Section 161 of the 2013 Zimbabwe constitution, there must be a population census and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission is required to conduct a delimitation of electoral boundaries into which Zimbabwe is to be divided using those census statistics.
ZEC began the delimitation exercise on 1 June 2022 and has held pre-delimitation engagements with stakeholders but election watchdogs such as ERC and ZESN insist on public consultations during the process.
According to the electoral management body, the delimitation process will be completed by 31 December 2022 in time for the 2023 elections.
Again, the constitution provides that if the delimitation of electoral boundaries is completed less than six months before the general elections then the new boundaries will not apply to the upcoming election, and instead ZEC uses the boundaries before delimitation.
Therefore, ZEC has four months to complete the exercise.
The 2022 delimitation exercise being carried out by ZEC is the first one after the enactment of the 2013 constitution.
However, the previous delimitation exercise was conducted prior to the 2008 elections but was criticized for no transparency and public involvement, which had a detrimental effect on the outcome of the election.
Transparency and Public Involvement Key To Delimitation Exercise
