by Bayano Valy – SANF 08 No 19
Zimbabwe is heading into the last days of campaigning for the 29 March harmonised elections, which will see the country hosting four polls in one day for presidential, senatorial, national assembly and council elections.
This is an administrative challenge for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), but ZEC says that all preparations are in place with ballot boxes already in constituencies, officials trained, and ballot papers printed.
This sets the stage for a big test not only for the electoral body but for the voters themselves who will be faced with four ballot papers of different colours. Nevertheless Zimbabweans are said to be among the most educated voters in the region having been called to vote in multi-party elections every five years since 1980.
The amendments to the legal framework for elections will enable polling officials to announce results at a ward level, with the results for all four contests posted outside each polling station.
This will allow for tabulation of votes at party level, and if deliberately or un-deliberately, the party officials get the arithmetic wrong, ZEC face the task of announcing official results more rapidly to correct perceptions.
In a meeting with observers and stakeholders, the ZEC chairperson, Supreme Court Judge George Chiweshe, said that the electoral body had established multiparty liaison committees that would ensure that any potential dispute was dealt with before it blew out of proportion.
Deputy-chairperson, Commissioner Joyce Kazembe, said that ZEC is well aware that parallel vote tallying and computation at speeds faster than the electoral body is capable of, is likely to take place, but she stressed that only ZEC can announce official results.
Commissioner Jonathan Siyachitema said he did not envisage a situation where Zimbabweans would seek to resolve or address grievances through other means than political and legal, adding that Zimbabweans are mature enough to be satisfied with the outcome of the polls and past experience suggests just that.
Many eyes will be on the ZEC as it is fruit of constitutional amendments that envisaged the creation of one body to conduct elections in line with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections.
The guidelines were adopted at the SADC Summit in August 2004 in Mauritius, and intend to provide a roadmap for the conduct of polls in the region.
Although elections were held in three of the regional countries in 2004 soon after adoption of the guidelines, it was during the 2005 Zimbabwe parliamentary elections that they were first incorporated and meaningfully tested. Further amendments were undertaken for the 2008 harmonised poll.
Apart from four presidential candidates, ZEC says there are 779 candidates for the 210 seats in the lower House of Assembly, and 197 aspirants for the 60 elected seats in the upper house, the Senate, from 12 political parties and 116 independents.
Meanwhile, ZEC has said that it will deploy 107,690 polling officers who will oversee voting in 11,000 polling stations throughout the country.
Zimbabwe’s electorate is about 5.9 million registered voters out of a population of around 12 million.
