By GRACE CHAILE LESOETSA
IT is a huge scandal that the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) did not seek the nullification of the Kanyama and Solwezi seats where lives were lost due to political violence.
Evangelical Youth Alliance (EYA) president Moses Lungu has noted that if the majority of the seats that had been nullified by the High Court were on account of violence and corruption the Solwezi and Kanyama should not be an exception.
He said it was not logical that in places where lives were lost, seats had been upheld.
On August 12, poll day, PF North-Western Province chairperson Jackson Kungo was killed in cold blood outside a polling station in Solwezi as he took voter registers to the party’s polling agents.
In Lusaka’s Kanyama constituency, two PF members Danny Kasongo and David Kabunda were brutally murdered prior to the elections.
Rev. Lungu in an interview said the alliance was shocked that elections held in constituencies where even lives were lost have been upheld.
He said that in honouring Zambia’s democracy and in respect for the rule of law and upholding human rights, they were expecting the elections for the two to be nullified.
“We are calling for the nullification of the Kanyama and Solwezi seats, if we seriously have to hold our politicians accountable. ECZ should have the audacity and morality to condemn those elections and to have them nullified in the courts of law,” he said.
Rev. Lungu said that the nullification of the elections would be a lesson for politicians to respect human life.
He added that the ECZ was a serious liability in the nation’s current democracy.
He said that it was disappointing that it was failing to defend the rules it created.
“ECZ created t rules which they cannot defend themselves before the courts of law. ECZ has been seen siding with the petitioners when they are supposed to be objective, politically neutral. Electoral officers have been testifying against the defendants in some petitions,” he said.
Rev. Lungu said that before aggrieved parties could petition the outcome of the elections, ECZ should have been the first court to have arbitrated upon the petitions.
`NULLIFY KANYAMA, SOLWEZI’
