CSOs Demand The Release Of ZEC's Report On 2018 Elections
A civil society organisation has called for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC)’s report on the 2018 elections to be made public.
The Elections Resource Centre (ERC) executive director, Tawanda Chimhini, said that the Electoral Act stipulates that the report on elections should be tabled before Parliament so that it can be opened up to public scrutiny.
Speaking to NewsDay on the sidelines of an ActionAid workshop on ACDEG held in Kariba, Chimhini said:
Zec has already submitted its report on the 2018 elections, but as civic society, we feel that their report concentrated more on administrative issues and that they got money for the elections, conducted voter registration, came out with a voters roll, ran polling day and appeared in court as respondents.
If these electoral reforms are not done we might end up getting into 2023 elections. We also need to use by-elections to test the effectiveness of the reforms that have been proposed.
However, they submitted their report to the Justice minister, but the Electoral Act further stipulates that Zec must give the report to the President, the Speaker of the National Assembly and candidates during the 2018 elections, but Zec has not fulfilled that yet.
Meanwhile, Zec commissioner Joyce Laetitia Kazembe said that the 2018 elections report was submitted on February 14 this year in accordance with the Electoral Act through the Justice minister Ziyambi Ziyambi. She said the Minister is the one responsible for tabling the report before Parliament. She said:
In the report, we actually covered everything that deals with elections including the role of the security forces, of which the law says they must not be involved in the actual process. They should just be there to provide security. We also indicated the role of civil society and political parties during elections.
