Mr. Katuka wondered why the Head of State and his party’s Secretary General Davies Mwila could remain taut to their seats at the two-hours long summit and fail to put the ruling party’s position on a number of pressing electoral issues on the table.
Mr. Katuka said it would not be wrong for anyone to think that President Lungu and his Secretary General kept quiet because they knew they were well represented by the ECZ officials and a number of their surrogate political parties. Some of these parties lacked depth and seriousness in the deliberation – to a point of asking Mr. Lungu for his daughter’s wedding cake.
“A meeting of this magnitude, attended by the Head of State has not yielded anything as it was a usual talking show. Worse still, the entire Republican President and his entourage, came for this meeting; sitting there for more than two hours and just walked out without saying a single word,” he stated.
That shows how they belittle important meetings because they cannot say anything; meaning even the processes that have done, they have not endorsed whatever has been said. Because if they did, they could have said something even commending ECZ for the meeting,” said Mr. Katuka.
In his usual fashion, Mr. Lungu, who came late for the Presidential Summit, sat mute for two hours; without a word.
The silence by the Head of State and his entire entourage in yesterday’s ECZ organised summit was a display of irresponsible leadership and confirms Mr. Lungu’s lack of commitment to a credible, free and fair election in the forthcoming 2021 polls.
He argued that the lack of consensus among political players on a number of contentious issues affecting the country’s electoral process such as the issuance of NRCs to foreigners and underage children, the breakdown in the rule of law and respect for human rights, restricted freedoms, and community violence should be addressed if democratic tenets were to be entrenched in the country.
President Hichilema said the current voters’ register is legally correct and has a provision for the removal of dead people from it.
President Hichilema also stated that compliance to existing laws in the country was at its worst both before, during, and after elections, saying that the trend has led to an increase in political violence, vote-buying using the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU), and abuse of the Electoral Code of Conduct (ECC).
He stated that it was laughable for the ECZ to allege that the discrepancies surrounding the removal of the dead people from the old register have prompted the elections body to come up with a new voter’s roll.
He said there were several contentious issues surrounding the electoral processes such as the archaic Public Order Act (PoA) which needed to be addressed as they affected the political environment in the country.
“All these contentious issues need to be addressed if the ECZ is to conduct free, fair and credible elections,” he said.
The ECZ has proposed among other issues, the implementation of the 2019 delimitation recommendation for new election boundaries and increasing the number of polling stations from the current 7, 700 to 8, 999 as well as a three-phased online registration method which will include pre-online, mobile and static registration in which the electoral body plans to capture between 8.8m to 9m eligible voters within 30 days.
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