HARARE – Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) Friday elected to take a cautious approach towards the delimitation report with senior party officials saying they were still to go through fine print on the crucial electoral document before they could take a position.
This follows the tabling of the voluminous document in parliament this Friday by Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi, setting the stage for its debating by the legislative house January 17.
The final report shall trigger processes towards the holding of the country’s hike stakes harmonised elections later this year.
CCC vice president and legislator Tendai Biti told the media he was not yet in a position to make an informed comment on the report before his party could sit down and analyse its contents.
“Now that we now have the report in our hands, we are now going to sit down with our experts to analyse it. Our concerns centre on whether section 161 of the constitution was complied with or not, are constituencies uniform, was there any gerrymandering, was there any creation of non-existent constituencies, does data support the report.
“We will get the answers to all these questions after doing some analysis on this report,” Biti said.
Fellow legislator Caston Matewu said any informed debate on the integrity of the report should be accompanied by access to copies of the voters’ roll.
“The raw source document for the delimitation report is imperatively the voters’ roll; this is where the delimitation report was derived from,” said the opposition lawmaker for Marondera West.
“For members to have proper debate and analysis, we need access to the voters’ roll to give us pure data and to see how exact the report was derived from.
“There can be absolutely no debate without actually having the electronic voters’ roll sent to all members.”
He was aided in his comments by Ellen Shiriyedenga, the CCC deputy elections officer, who said the opposition party “shall leave no stone unturned in ascertaining if the ZEC report complies with Section 161 of the Constitution and the fundamental principles of equality, transparency, inclusivity and accuracy”.
“To this effect, our technical experts shall be analysing this report, and notwithstanding some procedural issues we previously raised with ZEC over its failure to avail the voters roll.
“And the polling area statistics, incoherence in determining Ward and Constituency voter population thresholds, superficial public consultations and the role of the Ministry of Local Government in the determination of ward boundaries, among others,” Shiriyedenga said.
Delimitation is the process of dividing the country into constituencies and wards for the purpose of holding elections in accordance with Sections 160 and 161 of the Constitution.
The voters’ roll informs the delimitation exercise, in which the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) draws constituency and ward boundaries using a system of maximum and minimum voter thresholds.
The maximum threshold for national assembly constituencies is 33,169 voters, and the minimum threshold is 22,112 voters.
For local authority wards, the maximum threshold is 11,212 voters, with a minimum threshold of 7,474 voters.
In the delimitation report, ZEC announced that no voters were moved from their polling stations although their ward number or name of constituency may have changed.
