The Sunday News
Leonard Ncube in Victoria Falls, Sunday News Reporter
THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) has started engaging various stakeholders to apprise them on the impending delimitation of constituencies, wards and other electoral boundaries ahead of the 2023 harmonised elections.
The exercise is carried out in terms of provision of the Constitution and Electoral Act.
Zec spokesperson Mr Jasper Mangwana said the exercise was meant to explain legal frameworks in the Electoral Act and key factors to be used in conducting delimitation.
“We are meeting Chapter 12 institutions, political parties in Parliament including Members of Parliament of Zimbabwe taking them through the roles, expectations and procedures of delimitation as we go towards the 2023 harmonised elections,” said Mr Mangwana.
He said there were formulas and other key principles followed in the delimitation exercise.
“We are starting this exercise at high level and it has to cascade to communities for people to understand what delimitation is.
From our plan we should be able to meet timelines because already we have started pre-delimitation activities.
The only thing that is going to be holding us is the tabling of the census report,” he said.
Mr Mangwana said Zec strives to meet citizens’ expectations especially knowing when delimitation would be completed, when it would be given to the President and when the President would release it to Parliament.
Giving welcome remarks earlier, the commission’s deputy chair Mr Rodney Simukai Kiwa said Zec was required by law to conduct the national delimitation exercise for electoral boundaries.
Mr Rodney Simukai Kiwa
“This Is one of a series of meetings with stakeholders.
It is designed to raise awareness on the impending delimitation and the commission and stakeholders ought to be on the same wave length. So, the process entails consultation of voters and all stakeholders,” he said.
Mr Kiwa said the objective of the consultation was to apprise stakeholders on the impending delimitation, brief them on the mobile voter registration, encourage stakeholders to inform members of the public to continue registering to vote, encourage media to report from an informed point of view so that the anticipated outcome would be a shared vision on the delimitation exercise.
He said stakeholders have to understand reasons behind merging or splitting of constituencies if any.
Delimitation is conducted after a population census and is provided for in Sections 160 and 161 of the Constitution.
It is the process of drawing virtual boundaries and dividing of the country into constituencies and wards for the purpose of elections and involves coming up with a threshold of registered voters in each of the country’s 210 National Assembly constituencies.
The exercise could see constituencies with low number of registered voters being merged with others while some could be split into more than one, subject to the number of registered voters.
– @ncubeleon.
