UPND chairman for elections Gary Nkombo has accused the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) of trying to announce results which were pending to be approved.

Speaking to journalists after he stopped the Commission from announcing the Feira Constituency results, Friday, Nkombo said the figures were not correct.

He accused the Commission of giving 70 votes to President Edgar Lungu which belonged to Hakainde Hichilema.

“This is an ECZ document, you have seen that it is written pending approval. We have seen a difference between the content of our primary source document and the documents that needed to be approved. And in the process of wanting to approve that document, we were going to correct those figures because as far as we are concerned, these figures are not correct. As far as we are concerned, our figures for Feira Constituency, President Edgar Chagwa Lungu got 6,467 votes that is what we have on our record and Mr Hakainde Hichilema has 4,521 votes. But what you see here is that the 70 votes that have been reduced from our candidates and the same 70 have been added to the PF candidate,” Nkombo said.

“Who then is disrupting the process if they can call you to what they call the verification room to make the reconciliation of these figures to collapse into one page? They call the colleagues of more than 20 of them upstairs to sit and verify this, this is a one minute exercise. And as they are sitting waiting, the Commission is walking down to make the final announcement of a document that is written pending approval. You saw how Mr Nshindano condescendingly said ‘let us just proceed’ until there was an uproar from all the other stakeholders. I want to tell the ECZ that this is a people’s process, it is not theirs.”

He accused the Commission of trying to sneak in results.

“As you all know, they said all the agents come upstairs, they first made them wait for one hour, they wanted to sneak in their results, after we interjected, they said ‘come upstairs’. We waited for another 30 minutes, we asked for them to come out, and the officers said ‘you can’t come in, they will come out’. The time is not with us,” he said.

Nkombo said the Commission was the one disrupting the process.

“The public requires to know that the ECZ are the ones who are disrupting this process and not as somebody is saying around here. This is supposed to be a transparent process and ECZ should have been standing next to me right here because this this is their office to be able to say ‘you colleagues, you stakeholders are wrong, this is where you are wrong, we are right, and this is what how it ought to be’. And then we all sign off. Because once this is announced, we will not go back to it, it becomes official. How then did they want to announce a document which is written pending approval? There is something that is not right. Truthfully speaking, they are eroding the confidence of the process from the owners of the votes. The owners of the votes require their voice to be heard and they will not be heard in a manipulated form,” said Nkombo.