REPORTS that Lesotho’s voters’ register contains a staggering 100 000 individuals who are not supposed to be on the list poses a big threat to plans to hold clean and credible general elections next year.
An electoral expert contracted by the Independent Electoral Commission, R W Johnson, painted a not-so-rosy picture of the voters’ register in a report presented to the electoral body last week.
Johnson said Lesotho’s voter register currently had 987 180 voters, a figure he said was highly unusual given the realities of the HIV/Aids pandemic which is mowing down a significant chunk of the country’s 1.8 million population every year.
Johnson also noted that the voter register had an unusually high number of older voters between the ages of 65 and 75.
He suggested that this could be because some desperate families are failing to report the deaths of older family members to keep on accessing the government’s old age pensions.
The result is that we have a prevalence of phantom older voters on the register long after they are dead.
The voter register, Johnson said was “less good when it comes to cleaning the roll of the names of deceased or migrated citizens”.
The natural tendency is to downplay these glaring flaws on the register by seeking to compare ourselves with the worst case scenarios, such as Zimbabwe.
That would be a mistake.
We all know that things have fallen off the rails in that God-forsaken country north of us with the electoral body charged with running elections there deliberately manipulating the roll in favour of President Robert Mugabe’s regime.
Lesotho obviously has not sunk that far.
But that should not make us lower our expectations in demanding better standards for our democracy.
On another level there is no evidence yet that the IEC is deliberately manipulating figures to subvert the electoral process.
Given the findings of the report, which was compiled after three days of scrutiny, it is crucial that the IEC cleans up the roll of dead voters if we are to have clean, free and fair elections.
A clean voters’ roll is the basis upon which we can have genuinely free and fair elections.
On the other hand a defective roll can destabilise the electoral outcome, endangering our young democratic project.
Our political leaders must therefore resist the temptation to downplay the significance of the latest figures on the voters’ roll.
100 000, about 10 percent of all registered voters, is too high a figure to significantly tilt any electoral outcome.
Opposition leaders must therefore take the IEC to task over the issues raised at last week’s meeting.
They must demand that the IEC, in conjunction with civic groups, carry out a thorough audit of the voters’ register and weed out ghost voters before next year’s general elections.
The IEC must also deal with allegations by former commissioner Malefetsane Nkhahle that the register is in shambles.
That is a serious allegation.
The IEC must deal with the charge in a calm manner and reassure the nation that all is well and that we will not have a contested election come next year.