IEC berates political parties
Tsaone Basimanebotlhe | Friday March 6, 2020 16:44
Recently, the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) held an evaluation of the 2019 General Election and only a few representatives from the different political parties attended.
Legislators are the ones that can advocate for a change of the Electoral Act or seek for its amendment if there is need, but sadly many snub invitations extended by the IEC.
“It’s very disappointing and demoralising, considering the role that political parties play in elections. It is largely for them or they are largely affected and yet they stay back.
Do you think political parties take these kinds of workshops seriously and how they will affect them going forward? They naturally should, but what prevails on the ground tells a different story,” IEC spokesperson, Osupile Maroba questioned.
Maroba said they do not know what kept political representatives away, except for one, who indicated that they had not received the invitation, but still managed to honour the invitation as soon as they learnt about it.
He continued: “Our engagements with political parties are very important because they directly affect the very interests they are chasing, where their engagement would ensure that their will or interest is safe guarded. It’s disheartening because some of these calls they don’t heed to chart the way for future elections and changes are done in their absence. As the number one stakeholders, this could backfire on them and perhaps even when it’s too late for them to correct (where they’ve erred)”.
Maroba said People With Disabilities (PWDs) want certain changes to the Act for them to be catered for, which essentially should apply to any Electoral stakeholder, including political parties and politicians but it’s unfortunate that politicians miss things out.
He said the parties would not advocate for PWDs probably on how they want the Act to be amended on issues affecting them and at the end they would accuse the IEC claiming that it did not hold such workshops nor voter education training. Maroba said when some decisions are made in their ‘self-imposed’ absence, they would reject them on account of not being party to them. “We are duty-bound to bring all stakeholders on board because elections are a collective enterprise. We will devise other strategies and platforms of engaging them,” he said.
The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) and Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) did not send any representatives to the workshop.
However UDC spokesperson, Moeti Mohwasa said their party had taken a resolution not to participate in IEC workshops because the commission partook in election rigging in the 2019 General Election.
For their part, the BDP communication chairperson, Kagelelo Kentse said they had forgotten about the meeting and by the time they started looking for a representative to assign, all their officers had already committed to prior engagements.
“I do not think we will miss another workshop and it was not deliberate. We take IEC workshops seriously, stakeholders make decisions that may end up resulting in the Act being reviewed,” Kentse said.