By 
The Ad hoc Committee that was appointed by Parliament to analyse the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) Preliminary Delimitation Report has presented that the Report failed to meet Constitutional Values and Principles.
The Committee came up with key findings and observations which include insufficient information in descriptions of wards, a highly complicated coordinate system and unspecified map scale.
Presenting the finding in the August House, the Chairperson of the Committee Pupurai Togarepi highlighted that the use of the selective segment of the population census which is referred to as the adult population in the ZEC report fails to meet with the Constitutional values and principles.
“Consideration of factors in Section 161(6), The Constitution requires that all factors listed in (6) must be considered there are mainly, Community of Interest, Means of Communication, Physical Features, Geographical Distribution of Voters, Existing Electoral Boundary and Population. These also require stakeholders consultation and the affected voters.
“The Committee noted that the formula or the criteria used as the justification of the decisions made were not provided. The observations of the Committee was that there was possible misinterpretation by ZEC of the 20% variance provision of (6) as some wards /constituency ended up with a variance of up to 40%.
“In appliance to Section 161 of the Constitution, ZEC had the obligation to take due regard of other constitutional provision such as Section 3, 2, J which relates to Section 264 (2e) which provides the equable sharing of local and national census.
Togarepi added that ZEC also had an obligation to promote constitutionalism and ensure the injustice are remedied .
“In addition in terms of Section 233 (c) ZEC had an obligation to promote constitutionalism and ensure that injustice are remitted,” he said.
The Committee also indicated that ZEC should have considered other user-friendly methods which can be understood by ordinary citizens
“Then observation made on maps the committee noted that the coordinate system used by ZEC was too complicated for an ordinary Zimbabwean citizen to understand and interpret partial data represented on the maps. It is the Committees consider review that ZEC had and option to use a simpler geographic location system……,ZEC should have considered other user-friendly methods which can be understood by an ordinary citizens,” said Togarepi.
The Committee also noted that previous delimitation reports contained sufficient detail in terms of descriptions compared to the current ZEC report. ZEC could have maintained the same style which is user-friendly for ordinary citizens.
They further recommended ZEC to revisit the factor of community of interest between registered voters and ensure that it is taken into consideration.
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