ZEC always guided by the law: Chigumba
As Zimbabwe gears towards harmonised elections on July 30, there has been a sustained campaign by some quarters to undermine the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) — the independent body constitutionally mandated to administer elections in the country — with questions around its composition, independence, impartiality and transparency. The attacks on ZEC are seen as an attempt to delegitimse the outcome of the crucial polls. The Herald Political Editor, Tichaona Zindoga (TZ), sat down with ZEC chairwoman Justice Priscilla Chigumba (PC) to discuss these issues.
TZ: Can you walk us through the mandate of ZEC and where it derives its power and legality. PC: ZEC is one of those commissions which were set up in terms of Chapter 12 of the new Constitution which came into place in 2013. ZEC derives it constitutional mandate and the basis of its powers from the Constitution itself which actually stipulates firstly that it shall be an independent commission and gives it the exclusive mandate to deal with the registration, voters and all electoral processes. So basically its mandate is derived from the Constitution and from the Electoral Act and attendant regulations. TZ: What is the composition of
ZEC and its secretariat? PC: ZEC in terms of its organogram is made up of nine commissioners. There is a chairperson, who is myself, who takes the oath of office in terms of the Constitution. We have a deputy chairperson and other commissioners who among all nine commissioners each superintends one province. I am responsible for Harare Metropolitan Province. As you can see, it’s quite a large province. The secretariat is headed by the chief elections officer and we have other officers, directors in various departments such as voter education, knowledge management, ICT etc. TZ: How do you respond to allegations that ZEC is militarised, allegations which are of a serious nature and have swirled for some time now? PC: We take those allegations seriously. We do have former members of the army, Prison Service, ZRP, Central Intelligence, President’s Office officers. When I came in as chairperson I took time to sit and look at those allegations and found out that approximately 13.8 percent of secretariat staff has a security sector background. I checked all the records and I satisfied myself that of all of them none is currently serving. I would like to emphasise the fact that ZEC actually advertised certain posts and we had of that 13.8 percent of our secretariat, these are the employees of ours that responded to advertisement. They actually went through the interviews and were selected. So when you hear members of the public saying that ZEC is militarised, it gives the false impression that we walked into an army barrack or ZRP and arbitrarily chose certain people to come and work for us. But the truth of the matter is that most of these people, of the 13, 8 percent, actually joined ZEC more than five years ago. As you know, there has been a freeze on Government posts so we have not been able to recruit anyone. So we have had these employees for quite a while, they are our employees, they were employed in terms of the standard procedures and we have taken the position that there is no law in Zimbabwe which prevents us from employing someone merely because they have retired from the army or police. Our position is that we intend to keep our employees until such time as there is a law which instructs us or guides us to say as an electoral commission we may not employ such people. But we are an independent commission and we independently recruited these people and they are here to stay. TZ: Can you elaborate on the concept of independence. How is ZEC as an independent body supposed to work with Government and what is the nature of interaction between the two? Do you take instructions from anybody, let’s say from the Ministry of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs? PC: The Constitution guides us on the concept of independence and in a nutshell, the Constitution stipulates that ZEC “shall not” be under the direction or control of anyone. So that means in the discharge of our duties, we have absolute discretion in deciding what to do and how to carry out our mandate and our functions. In terms of our interaction with Government, we report to Cabinet through the Ministry of Justice, and when I say we report I don’t mean we seek permission from them to discharge our mandate. What we basically do is that on a weekly basis we have a meeting with the Minister of Justice and we advise him of how far we have gone on our preparations for instance if we have had the minister briefed this week. It’s not only ZEC, but also other commissions, the Judicial Service Commission, the Prisons Service, the Attorney-General’s Office, we all meet the minister and we tell the minister that week’s activities. For example, this week we would have told the minister that we have training for electoral officers in our province and what he simply does with the information is relate it to Cabinet. It’s a constitutional and legal way of actually keepingCcabinet informed about our activities and it benefits us in a way because for instance if we require money from the Treasury and if there is no money we go through the Minister of Justice, ask him to tell Cabinet to avail funds to Treasury. So it’s a reporting structure to keep Government apprised of all of our activities. We don’t seek permission from the Government through the Minister of Justice, he does not come to give us directions to say we should do XYZ, but sometimes he puts questions to us to say for instance, the question around the voters’ roll was raised in Cabinet and they would want to know what is happening with this and we respond to say this is how far we have gone. TZ: Another important concept or tenet relates to transparency. To what extent is ZEC transparent given complaints for example, now that ZEC has not allowed political parties to participate in certain processes they need to scrutinise? PC: It is my considered view that ZEC is more than 100 percent transparent and I will say so because of a few basic things. First thing is that we have what we call stakeholders engagements. We invite political parties to sit down with us and discuss. We invite civil society organisations and diplomats. Periodically, we do it at two months intervals. As we draw close to the elections, we will do these stakeholders engagement meetings once a month. We were doing them every two weeks and now we have a weekly chairperson’s briefing with the media where we sit with members of the media and advise them on what we are doing. With regards to the question of ballot paper printing, what I will say is firstly, ZEC is an independent commission, that means it cannot be directed by anyone to do anything, it means it cannot be controlled by anyone to do anything. How we interpret that as a commission is to say in everything that we do, we must always be guided by the law. So we start of from saying, what does the law say in regard to the ballot paper printing for instance? The law explicitly says ZEC has the exclusive and sole mandate to design, print and distribute ballot paper. So that is the legal position, the law is very clear; there are no grey areas. We have encouraged political parties during the time when the Electoral Amendment Bill was debated in Parliament to say look there is no legislative framework for these requests that you are making to us to be made part of these processes, so kindly go to Parliament and try to get these requests made part of the law. They did go to Parliament, if they want to be honest, they did try to get their requests made part of the law, it was debated in Parliament and the Parliament process, the legislative process itself didn’t work in their favour. And our position was, we must be guided by the law because we cannot be seen to be inventing arbitrary things which are not part of our law. The basic problem that we are having with certain requests is that, where there is no legislative framework in place, it creates difficulties for us but in the interest of transparency we have said to political parties that, I will give an example. We have 55 political parties who successfully fielded candidates through the nomination courts. So we have said look, we accept and admit there is no legislative framework, you tried to get the law passed in Parliament you failed, but in the interest of transparency why don’t you sit down as 55 political parties that are going to the election and try and reach consensus. So we know that there is one particular political party which has concerns, why don’t you table your concerns amongst your peers as 55 political parties? We do have what are called multi-party liaison committees, whose constitutional mandate is to build consensus around disputes pertaining to elections. Those multi-party liaison committees are chaired by Commissioner Doctor Moyo. So Commissioner Dr Moyo convened a meeting where he was supposed to discuss the modalities with the political parties to say, “What exactly is it that you like to see in the process of viewing the printing of the ballot paper or being included in the process?” Before he could discuss the modalities, that meeting was disrupted and commissioners actually had to vacate the room because of what was happening there. So this is now the bone of contention to say that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission was not transparent because it allegedly didn’t consult political parties; but in our defence I would like to say we did set up meetings; but that meeting was disrupted and as a result we then had to proceed with printing because the idea was parties would sit down, discuss modalities and then they could be there when printing started. The reason why they were not actually there is because that meeting was disrupted but we had a printing schedule which we had to stick to in order to be ready for the election day on the 30th, so we really couldn’t wait for political parties to organise themselves, we started printing. Full article on www.herald. co.zw