New constituencies to cost EC Shs16 billion
Electoral Commission chairperson Justice Simon Byabakama appears before the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee in September last year. PHOTO/FILE
The creation of new constituencies and elective areas will cost an additional Shs16b to enable the Electoral Commission make adjustments in preparations for the hitherto unplanned elections in those areas.
The EC also cited time and limited resources as the major hurdle.
The EC chairman, Justice Simon Byabakama, yesterday said they made proposals to government which are yet to be responded to but the Shs16b will be used to pay field officials and readjusting the initial electoral programme.
“This process begins from within the commission before going to the field to see which boundaries are changing and the shifting of the polling stations as and when people are affected which is called demarcation of electoral areas. This is something that came up abruptly and we cannot wait till the next election. So we shall have a quick process of organising elections in these places,” Justice Byabakama said.
“We might at some point be forced to recruit some additional field officials to expedite the process and we have a very short time to do this. We shall call all stakeholders to carefully study the changes and participate in accordance with the timelines and guidelines issued for the respective activities,” he added.
Last month, Parliament approved new 46 counties, 10 cities, five parliamentary seats for older persons, one district and prescription of 353 constituencies in the next Parliament. Government also created 168 new town councils and or sub counties.
“For purposes of absorbing the above new creations into the elections of 2020/2021, the EC, has had to make revisions to the electoral roadmap to provide for the demarcation of local government electoral areas and re-organisation of polling stations in affected parishes/wards in the created sub-counties, town councils located in various parts of the country,” EC said in a statement on Friday.
This means that the statistics on number of electoral areas and polling stations that EC displayed at the start of this year will change following the creation of new areas.
Constituencies
Identification of flag bearers within political parties vying for different posts in the 2021 elections is ongoing.
According to the EC website, there are 135 districts in Uganda, 257 counties, 296 constituencies and 2,062 Sub-counties or towns or municipal divisions.
Statistics also show that there are 10,029 parishes, 68,733 villages, 34,344 polling stations and the national register has 17,782,594 voters.
“These statistics will change and we shall be informing you about the developments. Out of this, the only thing that will not change is the number of voters because we shall not open a fresh registration but for now, other things will have to change. We are not yet sure how many polling stations we shall have,” Justice Byabakama said.
