THE National Assembly will reconvene on Friday to debate the preliminary Delimitation Report submitted to President Mnangagwa on December 26 by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC).
In an interview, Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi said guided by the timeline and the procedures set out in the Constitution, the Delimitation Report would be tabled before Parliament on Friday, after which all other processes will follow.
“The National Assembly will resume sitting to debate the Delimitation Report, which will be tabled on January 6, 2023,” said Minister Ziyambi.
In a statement yesterday, Parliament confirmed that legislators had been summoned to debate the report.
“In terms of Section 110 (2) (c), His Excellency, the President Dr ED Mnangagwa has summoned Parliament to an Extraordinary sitting to conduct special business relating to the preliminary delimitation report on Friday 6th January, 2023 at 9.00am. Due to accommodation challenges still being experienced in Harare, members are advised to attend the sitting virtually. The log in details will be shared in due course. A few members who will attend physically will be advised by the Chief Whips,” reads the statement.
The National Assembly adjourned in the third week of December and was expected to reconvene on January 24, with the Senate set to resume sitting on January 31, following the passing of the 2023 National Budget.
However, the Constitution states that once the report has been presented to the President, it has to be tabled before Parliament within seven working days, hence the early resumption of sittings.
Once the report has been tabled in the National Assembly, Parliament has 14 sitting days to debate the contents of the report and raise any concerns, which are forwarded to the President. He in turn then informs ZEC of concerns that have merit, and ZEC must amend the Delimitation Report before submitting the final document to the President.
The Constitution states that ZEC must divide Zimbabwe into 210 constituencies for the National Assembly, and into the number of wards making up each local authority.
As far as possible, each National Assembly constituency should have an equal number of registered voters and each ward within a local authority should have an equal number of voters. No ward can straddle a constituency boundary.
ZEC has to consider geographic features, community interests and communications when drawing up boundaries. Therefore, it is allowed to vary the size of a ward or constituency by up to 20 percent from the average within a local authority or the national average for the House of Assembly to meet this extra requirement.
The Senate is simpler, with each province regardless of population or the number of registered voters having an equal number of seats and being treated as a single multi-member constituency. Senate seats and the non-constituency women and youth members in the House of Assembly, who also represent provinces, are distributed between the parties whose candidates have won votes in the constituency elections in each province in proportion to those votes.
The detailed process of delimitation, which requires a lot of careful calculations, started on June 1 last year after a major drive earlier in the year to get unregistered qualified voters to sign up and those already on the roll who had moved to give their new addresses so they would be placed in the right ward and constituency.
Voters certified as having died were removed from the roll. Voters can continue to register, or change their address, right up to very near any by-election or harmonised general election, but for the delimitation process, ZEC takes the roll as it exists when it starts work, with all later registrations then placed in the wards and constituencies that the delimitation sets.
The preliminary delimitation report contains a presentation page outlining the provisions of the law in terms of which the report is presented to the President.
The report’s introduction indicates the factors influencing delimitation, the delimitation formula, and the rules used to guide the delimitation process, administration processes, and publicity and stakeholder engagements, among other issues.
Preliminary wards and constituencies are presented by province with each chapter highlighting the number of constituencies that have been delimited for the province and their names, the number of wards that have been delimited for each local authority in the province, and the summary boundary descriptions for the same. The report details the full ward and constituency boundary descriptions as annexures to each provincial chapter. This includes provincial maps depicting constituency and ward boundaries, which form part of the preliminary report. Zimbabwe is set to conduct harmonised elections round about the middle of this year.
