Women and youth representation in Parliament

Dear Editor,

THE Continental Leadership Research Institute (CLRI) calls on all political parties to ensure that more youths and women are adopted for representation in the 2021 elections at local government and parliamentary elections.

The institute has taken time to study the trend of adoption for elections across all political parties. Currently, parliament has less than three MPs who can be considered youths out of the 156 members and 13 percent who are women represented at parliamentary level which is very worrying.

We are aware that majority of population of Zambia is composed of youths and women but despite being in the majority youths are not well represented at parliamentary and local government level.

The only role that youths have been given is the role of being political cadres that are promoting violence as four women their role has been to sing praise songs for their leaders at ceremonial occasions and nothing meaningful. This trend is retrogressive and has to change in 2021 elections.

It recognises that there a number of factors that limit youths and women to participate in political processes who are aspiring for public office.

We call on all political parties to ensure that youths and women are considered in their adoption processes by creating deliberate internal policies that promote youths and women representation.

Parties should relax some internal processes for adoption for youths just as ECZ as made the fees for youths and women not to be uniform, such deliberate policies should be adopted by political parties and a certain percentage of adopted candidates should be allocated to youths and women.

Youths and women should be very conscious of which parties are pro youth and women in their approach to representation and not be used as tools of propaganda and violence but should demand to play more meaningful roles such as representative roles.

Youths shouldn’t settle for anything less and should aim at realising their hidden potential and should not allow being used for wrong reasons.

The issue of representation is key to development, the calibre of our representative directly affects the kinds of policies and level of development we are to achieve therefore our call is a solidified unity among youths and women to advocate for meaningful representation as a by-partisan issue in Zambia before the 2021 elections and should only support political parties that have clear policies regarding youth and women representation in 2021 elections.

MUNDIA PAUL HAKOOLA,

Mandela Washington Fellow,

Executive Director,

Continental Leadership Research Institute.