Members of RPF-Inkotanyi countrywide will this weekend start primaries in order to get the party’s candidates in the forthcoming parliamentary election scheduled to take place on September 2-3, 2018. The process will start at the cell level where party members will nominate two candidates of their choice. One of the nominees must be female. According to a statement from the RPF headquarters, this process is a manifestation of democracy, one of the founding pillars of the RPF, which is the ruling party. “The process provides opportunity for all party members to contest and be elected as it is their right. Those who will go on to win (come September) will work in the general interest of all Rwandans,” said Aimable Havugiyaremye, the RPF Commissioner in charge of elections. From the cell level, the competition will now go to the district level, where 20 top candidates will be shortlisted from the pool, depending on the number of votes garnered. From these 20, four will be elected to go to the national level. Out of these, two must be women. By implication, RPF Inkotanyi will have 120 parliamentary candidates contesting, going by the number of districts in the country. During the elections, fifty-three members of the Lower House will be picked through universal suffrage, while 27 slots are reserved for special interest groups and candidates under this category will be voted for through electoral colleges. The special interest groups are women (24 seats), youth (two seats) and persons living with disabilities (one seat). The 3rd Parliament which was elected in 2013 handed women an overwhelming majority in Rwandas Parliament, an unprecedented 64 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Out of the 53 directly contested seats, the RPF-led coalition took 41 seats. Article 75 Section 4 of the Constitution states that At least thirty percent (30%) of deputies must be women. Article 65 of the guiding principles of members of Parliament states that “every member of Parliament represents the nation as a whole and not only those who elected or nominated him or her, or the political organisation which seconded his or her candidacy during elections.” The revised constitution in its Article 76 provides that deputies are elected to a five-year (5) term and they may be re-elected to additional terms. editorial@newtimes.co.rw
