YONA MUSUKUWA WRITES BELOW….
Bane, forget about these fake provincial figures of registered voters being circulated.
The ECZ, through its Executive Director, Patrick Nshidano, have just given Voter Registration updated 30 minutes ago, as follows:
1. Phase 1, ECZ registered 1,106,000 voters.
2. Phase 2. ECZ registered 1,598,426 voters, moving up by 40% from phase 1.
3. As of today, a total of 2,704,426 have been registered as voters. This figure is 30.05% of the targeted 9,000,000 registered voters.
4. Patrick Nshindano said he could not give a break down by region, because its impossible for the ECZ to know because people are registering from one region to vote from another region.
This is macabre!
Firstly, the Electoral Commission of Zambia should be very transparent in their conduct and how they are conducting this process. Its conduct like this that arouse unnecessarily suspicions and undermine democratic elections.
Secondly, how do you hold such a serious press briefing without thorough information? How can an institution, as important and big as ECZ fail to know the number of people registered per Province? This should be biscuit for IT personel at ECZ to know. Mumbisanji ba mambala?
Thirdly, despite overwhelming response from the public, people are spending gruesome hours on queues because of ECZ inefficency. ECZ officers are serving too few people in a day. A paltry 2.7 million voters have been registered out of the targeted 9 million in 2 weeks, meaning 6.3 million remaining voters will have to be registered in the remaining 2 weeks before the registration process comes to an end. Clearly, we are not on course.
And lastly, I noticed that despite the briefing being very important for governance and democracy, only a few people, between 420 to 440 were watching. It shows that serious national matters are not on the agenda of our people. If it was Seer 1 or Tayali, it would have been over 10, 000,000 viewers. Bane, let’s pay attention to these things. Elections breaks or build a nation. Wars have been fought because of elections. People have died because of elections.
