Chronicle Editor
IT is either Bulawayo residents do not care about losing parliamentary constituencies or they don’t care about who leads them.
How else can one explain the fact that only 6 000 new voters were recorded in Bulawayo during the just-ended first phase of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) mobile biometric voter registration blitz?
The mobile voter registration is being rolled out in two phases and the first phase ran from February 1 to 28.
The second phase will run from April 11 to 30, but it is not expected that the number of new voters in Bulawayo will reflect the population of the city.
The effect of low numbers is that during delimitation – the process of dividing the country into constituencies and wards for the purposes of elections – seats could be lost as the current number may be deemed too much.
The Matabeleland region, which is least represented in Parliament, has 38 parliamentary seats out of 210 constituencies.
Bulawayo has 12, while Matabeleland South and North each have 13, with the remainder of the seats spread across the seven other provinces.
It is indeed worrying that the Matabeleland region has the least number of registered voters countrywide. This is likely to lead to the loss of constituencies ahead of the 2023 harmonised elections if people do not get registered.
According to statistics that were released by ZEC prior to the blitz, Bulawayo had the lowest number of registered voters with 254 630 followed by Matabeleland South with 259 689 and Matabeleland North standing at 335 851.
Delimitation, which is carried out after a population census and is provided for in Sections 160 and 161 of the Constitution, involves coming up with a minimum threshold of registered voters in each of the country’s 210 National Assembly constituencies.
Section 161 states that once every 10 years, on a date or within a period fixed by ZEC “so as to fall as soon as possible after a population census, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission must conduct a delimitation of the electoral boundaries into which Zimbabwe is to be divided”.
It will be very sad to see this exercise resulting in some constituencies with a low number of registered voters in Matabeleland being merged with others while some are being split into more than one in other provinces.
Voters will have no-one, but themselves to blame for the reduction in constituencies and the election of bad leaders.
Elections are the most important ingredient in any democracy and in countries like Zimbabwe war was waged and lives were lost to fight for that single right to vote; to choose political leaders.
This right must never be taken for granted, especially by young Zimbabweans who are supposed to be the new voters.
They must exercise the power that they have and choose their preferred leaders whom they must hold to account through elections.
We urge young people to go out in their numbers from April 11 to 30 and register as voters. They must remember that we get the leaders that we deserve.
Online Reporter