The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), says it will consider all the recommendations and concerns raised by Parliament before crafting the final delimitation report which should be ready by mid-February in line with Constitutional provisions.
Speaking at State House last week after receiving from President Emmerson Mnangagwa Parliament’s report on the preliminary delimitation report, Chigumba said:
The President called us today for him to formally hand over the report approved by Parliament which was written by the ad-hoc committee which was formed by Parliament.
We have received the report and we have assured him that we will have a look at all of the recommendations and concerns which were raised by Parliament.
In terms of the way forward, we are still to receive corrections from the President himself which we anticipate he will do in the course of next week, and thereafter, we will gather as a commission and look at all of the recommendations holistically and look at those we can accede to and those we cannot accede to and we will compile our report for His Excellency where we will state our reasons for acceding to certain recommendations and perhaps not acceding to some.
The Parliamentary ad-hoc committee made several recommendations that it wants ZEC to address. Some of the recommendations are:
- ZEC should take into account the entire population as shown in the census, not just the adult population because wards serve other purposes apart from elections.
- ZEC should revisit boundaries where it did not take into account community interests between voters.
- ZEC should ensure that there is an equal number of voters in constituencies and wards, with variations limited to 20% as required by section 161 of the Constitution.
- ZEC should apply consistent principles when transferring voters from constituencies and wards with large numbers of voters to those with fewer.