adminThe Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) and the Registrar General’s Office are inseparable and will always work hand in hand in maintaining the voters roll, the electoral body’s chairperson Justice Rita Makarau said yesterday.
Justice Makarau said every jurisdiction the world over relied on the civil registry to maintain a voter’s roll and it was only the RG’s office that had the mandate to remove any purported deceased persons on the roll.
ZEC assumed the responsibility of registering voters in line with Section 239 (c) of the new Constitution.
The Constitution mandates it to, in addition to its functions, compile voters’ roll and registers, ensure custody and maintenance of voters’ rolls and register and delimit constituencies, wards and other electoral boundaries.
Previously, the constitutional function to register voters was done by the then Registrar General of Voters.
Some Western-sponsored opposition parties and non-governmental organisations are demanding that ZEC and the RG’s Office should not work together in maintaining the voters roll.
“In maintaining the voters roll, removing the names of those who would have passed on, ZEC has to rely on the data supplied to it by the Registrar of Deaths and Births in that capacity,” said Justice Makarau on Star FM news programme, In the News This Week.
“We do not generate any documents that grant citizenship, so we will have to rely on the authority that generates that documentation for them to authenticate whether or not one is a citizen of Zimbabwe. We cannot be divorced from the civil registry no matter how far we want to go away from it.”
She added: “I have no way of saying you are above 18, only the civil registry can give us that information. There is no other way other than making reference to documents issued by Mr (Tobaiwa) Mudede’s office.
“If those who want us to be divorced completely from Mr Mudede’s office were to come up with a scientific way of telling us of how to select Zimbabweans above the age of 18, then we welcome to hear that.”
Justice Makarau said it was surprising that complaints about documents issued by the RG’s Office only popped up during election times.
“In all other daily activities and commercial transactions in life we rely on documents issued by Mr Mudede,” she said.
“I have not heard complaints about the integrity of those documents in those transactions but now all of a sudden when it comes to elections we have issues. The issue is not with the national identity documents, the issue is now our confidence in the machinery that runs elections. That is what we have to address and it is a question of educating the people and say sometimes we run away from shadows.”
Online Reporter