WE EXPLAIN REASONS WHY THE ECZ IS A PF ELECTION AGENT
Of late, we’ve seen very strange and bizarre behavior from the leadership of the Electoral Commission of Zambia, this is no coincidence, it’s a desperate well orchestrated scheme to rig the 2021 General Elections.
Let’s break it down for you and then you decide if the Nshindano executive is non partisan.
1: VOTER REGISTER
The Electoral Process Act of 2016 clearly states that the 2016 voter register should have been maintained, with deceased voters deleted and new voters added.
What did ECZ do?
They illegally discarded the voter register and created a new one of their own with total disregard of the law.
2: WAITING FOR BILL 10 AS LEGAL COVER
Secondly they should have commenced voter registration as far back as August, why did they not do it?
The answer is they were waiting for Bill 10 to go through to give them them the legal cover for some of the activities they were planning to engage in such as the creation of a new voter register and short registration period which are not supported by law.
3: VOTER REGISTRATION PERIOD
The Electoral Process Act of 2016 calls for continous voter registration, non stop registration.
The only time when ECZ should stop voter registration by law is when the campaign period begins.
What did the ECZ do?
They declared an illegal 30 day registration period, with a 4 day extension, a far cry from the usual 90 day registration period.
The first week was marred by problems in selected provinces of malfunctioning machines, inadequate staff and dead generators.
This was in addition to the tribal issuance and discrimination in the issuance of NRC’S.
He even went as far as to lie that they had over 9000 registration kits and all polling stations would operate as registration centers for 30 days, when in actual fact they only had 2400 kits and operated polling stations on a 7 day basis.
4: COMPILATION OF VOTER REGISTER
Mr Nshindano has failed to give the nation the total number of registered voters per province and constituency. He’s just giving block figures. He claims the machines are not online, not linked so they need to add up the numbers.
But we believe those machines are online, otherwise if they were offline how were they able to detect those people who were pre-registering online?
It means those machines were online and linked to a central computer that was feeding them data, and also retrieving data from them.
He has the numbers, and they are manipulating the numbers, that’s why he won’t share them now. They want the numbers to look ‘normal’ when they publish them.
It’s certainly possible that they could inflate the numbers in areas with low registrations to make it look normal.
Very strange that they’ve allocated 30 days to adding up numbers that are on a computer, the computer can add up those numbers in less than 10 seconds, why allocate 30 days? The same number of days that was allocated to registration?
5: NOMINATION DAY OF 15TH JUNE 2021
The law provides for a 90 day campaign period, but Mr Nshindano has put the nomination day at 15th June, 57 days before the election.
Is there sense in that?
Nominations are supposed to take place by 15th May, so he’s effectively cut the campaign period to 57 days, similar to what was in Bill 10.
By doing this, it will give the PF 30 days to buy off those candidates that have been adopted by the opposition before they get to file their nominations, a tactic the PF has used repeatedly in By Elections.
6: PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION PETITION PERIOD
The period to petition eligibility of candidates runs from 21st June to 10th July 2021, but Mr Nshindano has announced that printing of ballot papers will begin on 1st July.
Does that make sense?
How do you start printing ballot papers before the Constitutional Court has concluded its business?
Do you already know the outcome of the Con Court ruling?
7: 5 DAY VOTER REGISTER INSPECTION
Mr Nshindano has only allocated 5 days to inspect and certify and attest the voter register..
That doesn’t make sense at all.!
Stakeholders need at least two months to inspect the register so that they can identify all of the children, foreigners, duplicates and fake people on the register.
Why are they in a hurry to certify the register?
It leaves us to conclude that there’s something very big to hide.
If they are transparent they should provide the register to all stakeholders in soft copy format so that we can run it through various software to easily pick out any anomalies.
8: PUBLICATION OF RESULTS FROM POLLING STATIONS INSTEAD OF CIVIC CENTRES
Mr Nshindano announced that results will be published from polling stations rather than from civic centers.
This means that Zambians will be bombarded with over 40,000 sets of results across all elections.
At a presidential level you’ll have over 9000 sets of results being published on ECZ screens without proper verification or certification at the civic centre as has always been the tradition.
This will cause confusion and make it easy for results manipulation, it’s meant to confuse the people of Zambia as they will not know the presidential results per constituency until after a winner has been announced.
CONCLUSION
All of these actions paint a picture of a well orchestrated plan that was developed a long time ago to manipulate and rig the elections in favor of the PF, and the ECZ leadership are a key part of the plan and delivering this election to PF by any means possible.
Never in the history of Zambia has the Electoral Commission of Zambia engaged in so much illegality with such impunity and arrogance. -NDC