Voter Registration Struggling Due To Poor Government Funding - Operation Young Vote

Operation Young Vote (OYV) has pointed to significant bottlenecks forming during the first day of the voter registration on Monday, claiming that such backlogs have formed as a result of poor government funding to the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ).

“One of and the most inhibiting factor to efficacy results by the ECZ is the insufficient funding by the Treasury during such an important period. The PF Government and the Vice President in particular must own up and fund the ECZ adequately to attain its target of registering a minimum of 9 million voters,” OYV executive director Guess Nyirenda wrote in a statement.

OYV called on the government to immediately make more funding available to the ECZ, pointing to the hypocrisy of “wasting huge sums of resources on the campaign for Bill 10” while the issuance of NRCs and mobile voter registration remain poorly financed. 

In addition the organisation called for at least three field voter registration officers to be available at each registration centre and for voters’ cards to be replaced with a better quality material in order to last until polling day. 

They urged the government to act now, to ensure “no one is to be left behind, disadvantaged and disenfranchised” in 2021. 

OYV’s complaints have been echoed by several other commentators, including Kanyama MP Elizabeth Phiri.

Ms Phiri has called on the ECZ to deploy more registration officers after seeing that voter registration queues were hardly moving on the first day of the exercise. 

“We need manpower, am not happy that from morning to 15hrs only 70 people have managed to get theirs. I hope and believe that something will be done to improve this exercise soon as time will not be enough,” she said. 

The ECZ has until 12th December to register a targeted 9 million voters - approximately the entire adult population of Zambia.