Staff Reporter| There is a sizeable number of ex soldiers employed by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.

This was revealed in deliberations at a Parliamentary Portfolio hearing yesterday. MDC Secretary General Douglas Mwonzora claimed that the ballot papers have before been printed at the KGV1 (Josiah Magama) army barracks. The new ZEC Chair Priscilla Chigumba admitted while saying, “one of the first things that I did in my first 10 days of office was to call for a list of all ZEC permanent employees, which constitutes about 383, to look through this list and see how many people among those employees had a former military background.”

She continued saying, “ZEC policy is that we are not precluded from employing former military members, provided that they are retired and not active. We have less than 15% of those, but yes they are in the ZEC, but I would hasten to add that a lot of those former military personnel retired from their institutions five, six, seven years ago.

“I have gone through their files and satisfied myself that these are no longer serving members now. Unless and until the laws are changed that we are not at liberty to recruit retired members of the security sector, we maintain the position that those already in our ranks will perhaps for this elections remain in position until maybe we are informed otherwise.” FULL VIDEO: