Parties should disclose donors
The Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA) said parties should be transparent and disclose where they get the money to run their electoral campaigns.
The Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (Eisa) has made recommendations to parliament to consider a regulatory framework to reveal where campaigning political parties get their funding from.
Eisa, which was invited by IEC to assess the electoral proceedings, comprised of 14 short term observers drawn from civil society organisations on the continent.
Senior programme officer Cecile Bassono said the recommendation was based on experiences from other countries and advised that parties should be transparent in disclosing where their money for electoral campaigns came from.
“It can be sensitive because private donors may want to provide funding to a specific party and if that party does not win the elections, it becomes complicated for the private donor. We suggest that Parliament should consider such an electoral reform,” she said.
Eisa executive director Denis Kadima said the election process went smoothly and peacefully, but highlighted some key issues such as malfunction of scanners, known as Zip Zip machines.
He said the Zip Zip machine identified some of the as deceased or their names did not feature in the national population register.
A number of voters were turned away because they presented themselves at the wrong voting stations.
“The malfunctions led to voting staff resorting to a manual process of identification voters.”
Voting stations closed at 19:00 on Wednesday and counting started immediately until the early hours of Thursday morning, Kadima said.
“There were, however, notable delays in a number of cases due to inadequate familiarity with procedures by the voting staff. More so, the use of a single ballot box for more than one ballot augmented the delays in sorting of ballot papers per type of election before reconciliation and counting.”
As ballot papers are still being counted, Kadima urged all electoral stakeholders to maintain peaceful conduct.
“We urge electoral stakeholders to also establish channels to resolve any dispute that may arise from the outcome of these elections.”
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