Thursday, March 28, 2024

Green Party calls on ECZ to Abandon Fresh Voters Registration

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Green Party of Zambia President Peter Sinkamba has called on the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) to abandon the fresh registration of voters.

In a statement made available to the media, Mr. Sinkamba said that ECZ lacks the capacity to prepare a fresh voters’ register for the 2021 election and should instead just update the existing voters register.

Below is the full statement

ECZ LACKS CAPACITY TO PREPARE FRESH VOTERS’ REGISTER FOR 2021 ELECTIONS

The voter registration exercise that is earmarked to be conducted for thirty days from 18 October this year will just be a sham for five main reasons. First, the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) has publicly admitted that it lacks funds to run such an exercise. And for that reason, it has reduced the voters’ registration period from five months to one month but expecting to capture the same number of nine million voters in this period.

This expectation is certainly not realistic and unattainable. ECZ also lack human resource capacity to prepare a brand new voters’ register of nine million voters in thirty days period. Thirdly, the National Registration Card (NRC) issuance exercise is in jeopardy for various reasons, including financial. Fourth, the thirty-day timeframe designated by ECZ for voter registration, which included in the rain season is unrealistic to capture nine million voters. Fifth, the target number of voters earmarked to be registered is unattainable considering that there will not be a holiday for workers to do so, and farmers will be busy in the fields.

Holding of NRC is a condition to register as a voter. NRCs are not being issued at in all of the 103 permanent district offices of the Department of National Registration, Passport and Citizenship. Rather, this exercise is only being carried out in selected places.

In the previous election, voters with existing voters cards did not require to re-register. Rather, they were only required to verify that there particulars and voting centers were correct. And in any case, the voter registration update conducted by the ECZ was for six months from September 2015 to February 2016 and captured only one million five hundred new voters. If in six months, only one point five million voters were captured, how feasible is to achieve nine million voters?

The Department of National Registration is targeting to issue out seven hundred and fifty thousand new cards. So afar, less than fifty thousand have been issued in the last six months. We think that the scheduling of the voter registration exercise is wrong because over seven hundred thousand eligible voters have not yet received their NRCs.

We therefore propose that ECZ abandons the new voter registration project and instead just update the register so that the number of new entrants in the register is relatedly small and achievable. To continue assuming that ECZ will manage to register nine million voters in one month is simply wishful thinking.

Peter Sinkamba
President
Green Party of Zambia
8 September, 2020

5 COMMENTS

  1. I thought this Daga one man party boy has retired from politics. I wonder why he making so much noise from retirement. Yesterday it was about HH and today its about mafi mafi, too much mbanje with this useless ar.sewhore!

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  2. Don’t agree with you Mr Sinkamba. The ECZ should try to capture as many voters as it can. We should not disenfranchise people just because of money or the lack of it. The ECZ has suggested that voters should be registered online but some serial losers say no.

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  3. MEANING, update the existing register of voters and at the same time register new voters.
    Not completely do away with the existing register.
    I GOT IT.
    WE STILL USE OLD REGISTER ON BYE ELECTIONS, THEN WHY DISCARD IT.

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  4. Ecz cannot be told what to do. They are independent and capable of handling an election as they have done even before your useless party came into existence
    Why is it that those who don’t stand any chance of winning tend to make the loudest noises

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  5. The ECZ has embarked on a very dangerous path, they don’t have a mandate to do as they wish but rather to implement what the Zambians have agreed. First they talked about online voter registration, a process that defeats the requirement for a prospective voter to present themselves to a qualified officer together with their NRC to be registered and their photo captured. Why do they want to abandon a register that has now been widely accepted by many stakeholders? The current roll has exposed so many flaws in the NRC system as many citizens share NRC numbers. It’ll be better for ECZ to now talk about the adoption of the current register into the electronic voting system to ease the vote counting. Now they want to bring a new confusion. Zambia won’t make electoral progress with such…

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