In the districts, they are deployed deliberately by particular Government offices such as the office of the District Administrator and the office of Social Welfare. They are deployed deliberately to ensure that the distribution is taken towards a certain or particular political inclination. I have got an incident in Binga Hon. Speaker where I went at a Grain Marketing Board depot where seed maize was being distributed and the soldiers were the ones doing the distribution. I went to the Manager of GMB; Hon. Speaker, I am talking about specific incidents and the truthfulness of this can actually be checked. I saw the manager and asked him whether the people that were doing the distribution worked for GMB and he said no, they do not. I then asked him why he was allowing them to do the distribution and he said he had been instructed by the District Administrator.
Why would the D.A have to instruct soldiers that are deployed in various communities, including in Siyabwa where I come from to go 100 km away and distribute inputs? Is the GMB or the Government short of staff to deploy temporarily for that basis? The answer lies in the fact that this is an effort to try and manipulate the results of the elections so that when people vote, they should vote in a manner that is predetermined.
Finally Hon. Speaker, on ZEC – we believe that ZEC should be truly independent in word and indeed. It cannot remain an institution that is independent only in word but dependent when it comes to the deed. For example, the nation has not yet received a true and honest explanation on how Justice Makarau resigned from ZEC. There are a lot of questions that are surrounding her resignation. Does this have to do with a new dispensation, does it have to do with the fact that Justice Makarau was going to be a fair arbitter in the running of elections or does it have to do with the fact that the new dispensation thinks Justice Makarau was going to rig elections or the other way round that Justice Makarau would not comply with the pressure to rig elections from the current dispensation. So, we need an explanation. Hon. Speaker, these things should be explained.
I am not so sure why we continue to keep military and security personnel in ZEC. We believe that they need to be cleansed. What are we afraid of, why not retire them, we are retiring every other civil servants. Retire them, pay them off and we put in civilians to run that electoral board.
Finally, I hope that this law will deal with transparency in the production of ballot materials. If indeed we want to run a free and fair election, let us be open to everyone and say this is where we want to produce our ballot papers. They should not remain the preserve and secret of one political party. We should do that in a transparent manner so that when we go to the ballots, we will not have these mysterious statements about an X being put there and then suddenly appearing on another political party. For us to beat these mysterious allegations, we need to ensure that the law provides for a transparent production of ballot papers so that all parties are happy to say we know where the ballot papers were produced and definitely that these ballot papers are as they appear when it comes to the election day.
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