President Mnangagwa is today expected to hand over to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), a report by Parliament on the preliminary Delimitation report of electoral ward and constituency boundaries produced by the elections management body last month.
Speaker of Parliament Advocate Jacob Mudenda yesterday handed
over the report to the President at State House for onward submission to ZEC as
required by law.
The hand over was witnessed by the Deputy President of
Senate, Lieutenant General Mike Nyambuya (Retired), Justice, Legal and
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi and Acting Clerk of Parliament
Ms Hellen Dingane.
The report by Parliament was produced from the report by
the ad hoc committee it constituted from all political parties in the august
House, to analyse ZEC’s preliminary report.
It also contains
concerns raised by legislators during debate on Tuesday and Wednesday.
In his remarks after receiving the report, President
Mnangagwa said he would hand it over to ZEC today.
“I must hand over this report to ZEC within 14 days (from
the date it was submitted to Parliament) and the 14 th day is tomorrow, so I
will hand over the report to ZEC,” he said.
The report was tabled in Parliament on January 6.
Speaking to journalists, Advocate Mudenda said: “As was
indicated by His Excellency the President, he said he will hand it over to ZEC
tomorrow (today) so that the constitutional processes as laid out in Section
161 of the Constitution are complied with.
“Once they receive the report from Parliament, ZEC will,
hopefully, consider it, digest it and then after that they will produce the
final report which they will hand over to His Excellency the President and
thereafter, after 14 days of that hand over, His Excellency will gazette the
final report as required by the Constitution,” said Advocate Mudenda.
He also said Parliament had thoroughly scrutinised the
preliminary delimitation report by ZEC.
“The debate was quite robust, we had an ad-hoc committee
selected from both Houses and this committee did an excellent piece of work by
coming up with a critical analysis and recommendations arising from their
digestion of ZEC’s preliminary delimitation report.
“And that ad-hoc committee report was tabled in both
Houses, debated on January 18 in the Senate and they adopted the report,
whereas in the National Assemblythey continued debate on the following day and
finally also adopted the report of the ad-hoc committee as the report of the
Parliament of Zimbabwe,” he added.
In the report, the ad-hoc committee said ZEC failed to
follow procedures that include delimiting some ward boundaries below the
maximum and minimum thresholds as stipulated by the Constitution and also noted
that it did not provide sufficient information to justify the changes in ward
and constituency boundaries it made.
Parliamentarians that contributed to the debate echoed
similar sentiments raised by the ad-hoc committee citing situations that
occurred in their respective constituencies and recommended that ZEC consider
their concerns when coming up with the final report. Herald
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