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Joseph Madzimure Senior Reporter
Zanu PF Members of Parliament held a caucus meeting yesterday to deliberate on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission preliminary report on the delimitation of the electoral boundaries which will be open for debate in the House today.
The delimitation exercise was done in terms of the Section 161 of the Constitution.
Speaking soon after the meeting, the party’s Secretary for Information, Communication and Technology Cde Ziyambi Ziyambi said the meeting was meant to inform members that they are free to interrogate the report in Parliament.
“Members come from different constituencies and there are set constitutional requirements that have to be satisfied within the delimitation report. So members are free to go and interrogate what the committee presented, their own experiences in terms of the delimitation process and relate to the constitutional requirement that are there and express their views in the debate in a manner that will ensure that everything will be captured and transmitted to President Mnangagwa for onward transmission to Zimbabwe Electoral Commission,” said Cde Ziyambi
Under the Constitution, the Commission must divide Zimbabwe into 210 constituencies and into the number of wards making up each local authority.
So as far as possible, each constituency should have an equal number of registered voters, and each ward within a local authority should have an equal number of voters.
No ward can straddle a constituency boundary. ZEC has to also look at geographic features, community interests and communications when drawing up boundaries, so is allowed to vary the size of ward or constituency by up to 20 percent from the average to meet this extra requirement.
The report details the full ward and constituency boundary descriptions as annexures to each provincial chapter, this includes provincial maps depicting constituency and ward boundaries, which form part of the preliminary report.
The Constitution further states that when drawing boundaries, due consideration be given to: physical features; the means of communication within an area; the geographical distribution of registered voters; any community of interest between registered voters; existing electoral boundaries and population.
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