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Tendai Mugabe Senior Reporter
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has received major endorsement for running elections in a professional manner, with fellow African countries flocking to the country to learn from experiences of the July 30 harmonised elections.
First to visit Zimbabwe was Lesotho, and on Monday, ZEC was hosting the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia, which will be conducting elections for the east African nation in 2020.
Indications are that several African countries are reaching out to ZEC with a view to come and learn from its experiences.
The Ethiopian delegation is in the country on a three-day working visit and is being led by the chairperson of that country’s National Electoral Board Ambassador Samia Zekaria Gutu.
Ambassador Gutu told The Herald on the sidelines of their meeting with ZEC in Harare on Monday that they were keen to learn from Zimbabwe’s experiences, especially on how the country managed to come up with a clean biometric voters’ roll in a record time.
“This is to share experiences,” she said.
“Zimbabwe has just finished its elections last July. We really got a good impression about it. We want to learn from Zimbabwe, especially the new use of the new technology, that is the biometric voter registration.
“We would like to go into that new technology. Our former Prime Minister Mr Hailemariam Desalegn was the African Union Election Observer Mission (AUEOM) chair and he had a good impression about the elections and he is the one who advised us to see how you did it.
“Since we are also trying to modernise our elections, especially the voter registration, he said it is important to go and see Zimbabwe with the short period of time that you managed this biometric registration. We are running out of time because our next election is in 2020.”
Ambassador Gutu said they would be managing an election of about 30 million people and it was important to start the preparations now.
ZEC acting chief elections officer Mr Utoile Silaigwana said the Ethiopians were impressed with the manner in which Zimbabwe conducted the July 30 polls and wanted to implement the same in their country.
He said the Ethiopians acknowledged that the July 30 harmonised elections were conducted in line with international best practices.
“This meeting is actually a request from the Ethiopian Elections Board,” he said.
“They want to learn how we conduct elections in Zimbabwe. This is a request after the former PM of Ethiopia, who was the leader of the AUEOM in our elections on 30 July was impressed by the way we conducted our elections, particularly the biometric voter registration system and the new register we came up with.
“You are aware that as ZEC, we came up with a completely new voters’ roll which was biometric-based. So they were impressed and they have come to learn and see how they can implement the same. It is important to note that this is not the first group to come to Zec and learn how to conduct elections in a professional manner.
“We also had a delegation from Lesotho Electoral Board who came here to learn. This delegation of the Electoral Commission of Ethiopia are saying what we have seen during your general elections we are impressed and as a fellow African country we want to learn more on how ZEC conducts elections, manages elections and how ZEC conducted its biometric voters registration leading to new clean voters’ roll, which had no problems at all.
“We are here sharing knowledge on electoral expertise and they are appreciating that our elections were done based on international best practices.
“They are having their elections in 2020 so they want to implement the biometric voter registration and the general conduct of elections.”
Online Reporter