adminUtoile Silaigwana
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) led a team that included members of political parties in Parliament, to South Africa to get an appreciation of how that country is preparing its general elections scheduled for next month.
Our reporter Sharon Munjenjema spoke to ZEC chief elections officer Mr Utoile Silaigwana about the trip. We publish Mr Silaigwana’s response in his own words.
The trip to the South African Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) was organised by ZEC through collaboration with our funding partners, the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA).
ZEC and its stakeholders, including representatives of Zanu-PF, MDc-Alliance, MDC-T, New Patriotic Front (NPF) and an independent legislator Mr Temba Mliswa attended the meeting.
We learnt how their multi-party liaison committees work. Taking into account that the IEC is preparing for elections this coming month, this was really a push factor for us to go.
What we wanted to learn was not only how those multi-party liaison committees operate, but also their systems in terms of election management.
The South African multi-party liaison committees operate basically like ours, which are a mechanisms for the political parties to solve the disputes that may arise without necessarily taking them to court.
There is quite some maturity in the way they operate, they gave an example of a situation where members of one political party removed posters of another party.
The leadership of the party whose members had defaced the campaign material went public to apologise and condemned their supporters for their actions because this was a violation of rules of elections.
We also learnt that their multi-party liaison committees engage regularly.
We had an opportunity to also meet some of the members of multi-party liaison committees who also talked to us about how they operate and agree on issues without taking them to court and we found that exhibiting maturity.
There is also a lot of observance of the Code of Conduct of political parties largely because once political parties make themselves known to the IEC, there is a registration process they have to go through, there are no briefcase political parties.
Issues of observance of the Code of Conduct are governed by the electoral commission which has powers to penalise those who are in breach of the regulations.
Some of the penalties are either that the political party or candidate is suspended from campaigning, have a certain number of votes removed from the final result or barred from contesting for election.
The strict measures deter political parties from violating the Code of Conduct.
We also learnt that their system of managing results, which is embedded in the electoral law allows them seven days to announce results.
They may do it earlier than that, but we realised there is observance of that period in South Africa. They wait for the seven days unlike our scenario where, for example, we had five days to announce the Presidential election results, but on day two people were already condemning us for delaying the announcement.
The IEC is also well-funded and this allows the body to do adequate preparations on time. What we need to do, funds permitting, is to engage all stakeholders including the electorate continuously to make sure they observe the electoral law.
This assists the institution that runs elections to perform its job as it is constitutionally mandated, without any infringements in ZEC’s processes.
In South Africa, the stakeholders do not hold the IEC as the only responsible authority for conducting elections, they acknowledge that each person and organisation has a role to play.
As such, political parties also have their role to play to enable the IEC to play its own part. That is something we need here. Going forward, we are looking at how we can begin to engage our stakeholders now and not wait until 2023 to start talking about electoral issues and processes.
In our situation, the setting up of multi-party liaison committees is done soon after the sitting of the nomination court.
At that time ZEC is usually constrained with a lot of issues.
In the last election, there was an amendment to say that the multi-party liaison committees can be established six months before elections, but we still feel the period is still short.
If funding can be available through-out all phases of an election, it brings in a lot of advantages as it enables ZEC to do its work and engage stakeholders on time.
I want to believe that if we get funding throughout the election cycle we would be able to spread our activities.
We also want to see how we can strengthen our own Code of Conduct for political parties so that it is not just a document that is more of a persuasion to political parties, but so it can have sanctions attached to it.
Like we noted in South Africa, a candidate can be disqualified from contesting an election for violating certain provisions of the code.
We also want to engage stakeholders and dispel misconceptions about our elections and increase trust in the commission.
Right now, voter registrations is continuing and voter educations is needed.
This will reduce tension when we come to the election period.
ZEC periodically observes elections in the region and beyond, we had our commissioners recently observing the polls in DRC and Nigeria.
This enables us to learn electoral processes in other countries and see areas that we can improve on back home.
The issue of bringing in technology in elections is a continuous process, for example, in Zimbabwe we introduced the biometric voter registration. In other countries, they have moved on to use technology to identify a voter at a polling station others have moved to enable a voter to vote electronically.
In future we will move forward and fully utilise latest technology to conduct our elections.
Online Reporter