AfricaPress-Tanzania: IN any boxing match, call it a bout if it pleases you, is like a war where there must be winners and losers and the same applies to political parties’ contesting to send one of their flag bearers to become the man at the helm of the State as the constitution allows in Tanzania.
Precisely, Tanzanians headed to the peaceful polls yesterday for presidential and parliamentary elections with millions of voters filing polling stations in the wee hours.
In several spot-checks, lines were witnessed at several polling stations across the country, as some citizens took to social media to show that they had already voted as early as 9am, giving the sick, elders, pregnant mothers and people living with disabilities priority not to queue and that showed maturity on the part of the electorates.
Put aside, what is ahead is for the National Election Commission (NEC) to give the way forward by collecting all the results countrywide according to its processes and announcing the winners and losers with their garnered votes.
This is NEC’s constitutional task, not any other person or entity coming up that so and so, because their darling candidate has won.
This is a criminal offence for any person or group of people to start circulating a result that is not authorized and blessed by NEC because, it might cause unnecessary confusion and lack of trust in the whole process of peaceful voting.
Revising what NEC Chairman, retired Judge Semistocles Kaijage told journalists in Dar es Salaam, recently: “According to the constituency and the Election Act the only authority that is mandated to announce the results for Presidency, Member of Parliament (MP) and Councillors is the NEC.”
For that matter, if any person (electorate) thinks there was rigging or any malpractice in any Polling Station, he/she should inform the Police Force, but not take the law into hands and start condemning or circulating unconfirmed statement(s) that might tarnish the image of the whole voting process.
The Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority, established by the TCRA Act No. 12 of 2003 teaming with police should see into that people with ill intentions are not allowed to usurp powers of NEC and confuse the public with such unauthorized results.
Tanzanians want peace after the elections to build their country, because we can’t spend all the days year round in politics, and again any misinformation spread and severally repeated will automatically acquire the same weight as noble truth, whose end result might be like a tinderbox to harm the nation.
