Former Minister of Economic Planning and Investment Promotion, Elton Steers Mangoma says the draft delimitation report tabled before Parliament last week is unconstitutional as it failed to comply with sections of the Constitution.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) conducted a delimitation exercise to fix new electoral boundaries of constituencies and wards ahead of the forthcoming plebiscite.
In a letter addressed to the ZEC chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba and Speaker of Parliament Jacob Mudenda, Mangoma said the Commission used wrong parameters to draft the report hence it falls short of the requirements.
“The aim is to show that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has misinterpreted section 161(3) and 161(6); making the draft delimitation report unconstitutional. The aim of delimitation as in section 161(3) is to get all the voters fair representation across the 210 constituencies. Without section 161(6) this would be a simple mathematical exercise of dividing the registered voters by 210 constituencies.
“Section 161(6) provides guidance in the operationalisation of the equality of voters into the constituencies, and more importantly gives a 20% difference between the highest and the lowest. This means that the difference between the constituency with the highest number of votes and the constituency with the lowest number of votes must not be more than 20%.
“Note 4.1 in the draft delimitation report on page (xi), ZEC worked with a guidance of 33,169 as the highest and 22,122 as the lowest number of voters per constituency. The difference between these is 11,047. This difference is 50% of the lowest number and 33% of the highest number, which is clearly above the 20% dictated by the Constitution. ZEC has used these wrong parameters and consequently the resultant draft delimitation report falls foul of the Constitution,” said Mangoma.
He said the correct interpretation should have seen the total number of registered voters divide by the number of constituencies.
The average number of votes obtained by dividing the total number of registered voters of 5,804,376 by 210 constituencies is 27,640. To work with a difference of not more than 20% between the highest and the lowest voters per constituency, the lowest number of voters should be 25,150 and highest is 30,130. The difference between these numbers is 4,980 voters. The difference of 4,980 voters gives a difference of 20% as required by section 161(6) of the Constitution,” he said.
Mangoma offered free services to ensure that the delimitation report complies with the spirit of the Constitution.
