Vusumuzi Dube, Online News Editor
THE national delimitation exercise will this year include wards as the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) pushes to ensure everyone enjoys the right to vote.
Zec will delimitate the 210 constituency National Assembly seats for the 2023 polls in a manner that reflects the population distribution premised on latest census data. The local authorities determine the number of councillors themselves.
Speaking during a media training workshop on electoral processes in Chinhoyi recently, Zec director legal affairs, Ms Shamiso Chihuruva said according to the law, the delimitation exercise must be completed and gazetted six months before any election, hence they were under pressure to start the process.
“If we fail to complete this process on time, we will have defeated the principle of universal suffrage because our constituencies are different in terms of voter population. In 2008 the issue of equality of population did not apply in wards but in the 2013 constitution, it now stipulates that even for wards, each ward should have nearly the same number of voters as the next ward.
“I will give you an example of Harare Municipality which currently has 46 wards, in ward one for example that is in Harare South with a voter population of 76 000, when we were to divide the voter population for Harare Municipality, you will find that the North-Eastern part of Harare, the communities are sparsely populated as compared to Harare South.
We will have to end up bringing together various suburbs to form a ward, this resulting in a very large ward with different communities of interests with one councillor, these are some of the challenges which the public has to now be alive to so that when it actually happens they won’t be surprised,” said Ms Chihuruva.
She said during the exercise they would come up with a threshold which the wards and the constituencies will then have to meet, ensuring that the set threshold does not violate issues to do with communities of interest to an excessive extent.
The Zec director legal affairs said the constituencies that emerge after the delimitation exercise will be described by the wards that make up that constituency as well as the physical boundaries.
“Most importantly Zec will consult various stakeholders, there is no way that we can do this alone, what makes it easier is that most political parties are decentralised to the districts, so we will then convene multi-party liaison committee meetings and whatever disputes they will be dealt with there, if there is no resolution they are then escalated to the commission to handle.
“Right now we are in the process of awareness, which we will do with various stakeholders ranging from political parties, the church, civic society, media, to mention but a few, so that they have an appreciation on how the process goes, which will then limit the number of disputes that we anticipate,” she said.
Ms Chihuruva emphasised the importance for the commission to timeously work on the exercise noting that it was unfortunate that they could not hold it concurrently with the national census.
“We, however, expect that by the time that the President gazettes the delimitation results there will be time to use the results for the elections considering that they cannot be used when the election is less than six months away.
Our hope is to start this process early so that we thrash out all these possible disputes and avoid a scenario where we leave others still aggrieved. We are in consultation with Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency (ZimStat) to try get their timelines so we can also kick-in once they finish,” she said.
She, however, revealed that they had already started preliminary processes, in known contentious areas which include Harare South, Cowdray Park, Umguza and Caledonia. The legal framework provides that all the 210 National Assembly constituencies, as well as all the wards within one local authority must have equal voter populations.
However, due to different rates of population growth, migration and to land use changes, the boundaries of constituencies and wards need to be redrawn on a regular basis. Zimbabwe’s constitution requires exercise to be undertaken once every ten years and as soon as possible after a population census.