2010 General Election set to cost 134 billion/-

NEC Election Director Rajab Kiravu

The National Electoral Commission (NEC) announced yesterday it would spend nearly 70bn/- in updating the Permanent Voters’ Register (PVR) and additional 64bn/- in organizing the 2010 General Election.

The planned spending reflects over 30bn/- increment compared to the last election held in 2005, where the spending structure was 38bn/- for the establishment of the PVR and 58bn/- for the presidential, parliamentary and councillors’ elections.

Both the NEC Election Director Rajab Kiravu and the commission’s vice-chairman Omar Makungu told editors from different media outlets at a special briefing held in Dar es Salaam that preparations for the General Election were going on as planned.

On NEC election spending in particular, Kiravu said his commission was optimist that a large portion of the money would come from local sources through next year’s National Budget.

“The government covered most of the costs in previous General Elections. Its contribution against donor funding accounted for 84 per cent in 2000 and 87 per cent in 2005. We hope that it will continue reducing donor dependency in next year’s elections,” he explained.

According to Kiravu, ballots would be cast at 55,000 polling centres throughout Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar and each one of them would be served by four commission staff members.

Regarding the updating exercise, he said the commission planned to reach a total of 21 million people and would apply a digital technology in mapping election areas and process.

On the election law, he said NEC was, among other things, seeking to push for the changing of the law allowing presidential and running mates to pull out from elections to avoid unnecessary inconveniencies and embarrassments.

Kiravu said the commission was still considering various options for subdividing some constituencies and results would be made public in future.

“We are still consulting various stakeholders and final results will be released when we are done with it,” he said, adding that the exercise is done routinely after a period of 10 years. The last time NEC subdivided constituencies was in 1995.

He explained that one of the important criteria under consideration was the size of the parliamentary debating chamber in the country’s designated capital, Dodoma. Any plan to add more constituencies should take into consideration the ability of the chamber to accommodate more lawmakers, Kiravu reminded.

Another criterion, he said, was the government commitment to increased women representation in accordance with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) protocol requiring signatories to ensure 50 per cent women representation in key decision-making bodies, including the Parliament.

He said NEC would not rush into subdividing the constituencies until it gets the exact position of the government on the matter for it to make clear calculations on the number of special seats and thereby determine the number of seats to be added.

Responding to a question on media endorsement of certain presidential candidates, he said with exception of state-owned media, which NEC is required to ensure give all candidates equal opportunity in their coverage, other media “are free” to endorse candidates of their choice.

Msomaji

Dar es salaam