THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) says the delay in electoral reforms is as a result of Parliament dragging its feet in aligning the Electoral Act to the 2013 constitution.
BRIDGET MANANAVIRE
Zec spokesperson Joyce Kazembe told The NewsHawks that the commission had done its part by suggesting the sections that need to be changed and it is now up to Parliament to deal with the policy changes.
The main opposition Nelson Chamisa-led MDC Alliance and civil groups have been pushing for the electoral reforms, which they believe will pave way for free, fair and credible elections in Zimbabwe.
This comes as the Electoral Bill is missing from the legislative agenda of the fourth session of the ninth Parliament opened by President Emmerson Mnangagwa last week.
Kazembe said Zec submitted a paper to Parliament just after the constitution came into force in 2013.
“Soon after the new constitution, which is not new anymore as we are getting to 10 years now, we constituted a group of what we would call the bright legal brains to look at the old constitution and the new constitution and pick out the areas that were not aligned to the new constitution. We did that for three days while they were in a secluded place,” Kazembe said.
“They looked at that, they wrote a paper, we submitted that because every Zimbabwean has a right to go Parliament for the alignment of the constitution, we submitted that to Parliament. However, it is also important for the media to highlight those areas that need alignment. We did what we could do, we submitted a list of the areas that needed to be aligned to the new constitution; today, some of them we are still awaiting.
“I will give you an example, the subsection that governs media monitoring was passed in 2008, that is what we are still using, although we submitted a long time ago that it needed.
