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Tendai Mugabe, Harare Bureau
THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has received major endorsement for running elections in a professional manner with fellow African countries flocking to Zimbabwe to learn from the experiences of the July 30 elections.

First to visit Zimbabwe was Lesotho and yesterday Zec was hosting the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia, which will be conducting elections for the east African nation in 2020. Indications are that several African countries are reaching out to Zec with a view to come and learn from its experiences. The Ethiopian delegation is in the country on a three day working visit and is being led by the Ethiopian chairperson of the National Electoral Board Ambassador Samia Zekaria Gutu.

Ambassador Gutu told our Harare Bureau on the sidelines of their meeting with Zec in Harare yesterday that they were keen to learn from Zimbabwe’s experiences especially on how the country managed to come up with a clean bio metric voters’ roll in a record time.

“This is to share experiences. Zimbabwe has just finished its elections last July. We really got a good impression about it. We want to learn from Zimbabwe especially the new use of the new technology that is the bio metric voter registration,” she said.

“We would like to go into that new technology. Our former Prime Minister Mr Haile-mariam Desalegn was the African Union Observer Mission chair and he had a good impression about the elections and he is the one who advised us to see how you did it. Since we are also trying to modernise our elections, especially the voter registration, he said it is important to go and see Zimbabwe with the short period of time that you managed this bio metric registration. We are running out of time because our next election is in 2020,” said Ambassador Gutu.

Ambassador Gutu said they would be managing an election of about 30 million people and it was important to start the preparations now. Zec acting chief elections officer Mr Utoile Silaigwana said the Ethiopians were impressed with the manner in which they conducted the July 30 polls and wanted to implement the same in their country.

He said the Ethiopians acknowledged that the July 30 general elections were conducted in line with international best practices. “This meeting is actually a request from the Ethiopian Elections Board,” he said.

“They want to learn how we conduct elections in Zimbabwe. This is a request after the former PM of Ethiopia who was the leader of the AUEOM in our elections on 30 July was impressed by the way we conducted our elections particularly the bio metric voter registration system and the new register we came with.

“You are aware that as Zec, we came up with a completely new voters’ roll which was bio metric based. So they were impressed and they have come to learn and see how they can implement the same. It is important to note that this is not the first group to come to Zec and learn how to conduct elections in a professional manner. We also had a delegation from Lesotho Electoral Board who also came here to learn.

“This delegation of the Electoral Commission of Ethiopia are saying what we have seen during your general elections we are impressed and as a fellow African country we want to learn more on how Zec conducts elections, manages elections and how Zec conducted its bio metric voters’ registration leading to new clean voters roll which had problems at all.

“We are here sharing knowledge on electoral expertise and they are appreciating that our elections were done based on international best practices. They are having their elections in 2020 so they want to implement the bio metric voter registration and the general conduct of elections.”