Scores of people turning up at different voter registration centers in the country have expressed concern with the pace at which the process is being carried out, saying it is very slow and stressful.
In Dundumwezi, Member of Parliament Edgar Sing’ombe yesterday, described the process as pathetic, claiming that only four people were being registered per hour.
Meanwhile, Vice President Inonge Wina has since urged the Electoral Commission of Zambia -ECZ- to open many registration centres to enable eligible citizens to acquire voters’ cards.
Wina says if the process to obtain a voters’ card is slow, it will discourage would-be voters from acquiring the document.
She said this in an interview shortly after obtaining her voters card at Silverest Primary School in Chongwe yesterday.
Wina also urged ECZ to sensitise the community on the process and where the would-be voters can obtain voters cards ahead of the elections.
Apparently, many have since been questioning ECZ’s capacity to register all the eligible voters in a short period, they ask; ‘How can you allocate one voters registration officer per centre to attend to hundreds of people?
‘This is time consuming for people that are registering even the process itself might take longer than your projected time limit and abuse of Labour for your employees, do you know how stressful and exhausting it is to deal with a lot of people on a daily basis?
‘That material you guys are using is also pathetic, it’s cheap quality, even the design not so good, you are using too much ink on it, you should have designed something simple to save money and use it for hiring more workers,’ they say.
Meanwhile, Binwell Mpundu has called on the electoral management body to reverse its idea to have a new voters roll and wrote…
Reversing a decision is not a sign of cowardice or luck of foresight let alone a sign of dullness it actually is the best attribute for successful decision makers.
Here ECZ may need to consider reversing the decision to have a complete new register because the new exercise will not be pulled off for many reasons.
The time it’s taking an officer placed in those registration centers to attend to one person is a serious indication we will not register 9 million people. If the machines where super fast and we had too many registration points and streams we could have pulled this off.
My suggestion is that ECZ should consider simply cleaning the old register up and replacing those who have lost their cards, changing voting stations for those who would like to change and giving the new voters their cards plus removing those who have died off the register.
If am proved wrong I will gracefully give credit to ECZ but I think if they are to pull this one off they will need to triple the results and perfomance of yesterday across the country.
This is simply my honest observation and am not in any way trying to undermine anyone. I mean to help and my thinking here is based on what I witnessed yesterday in all the centers I visited and I will continue to visit the centers and will report if there will be improvements.
BINWELL MPUNDU
UMWINA NKANA