The National Monitoring and Consultative Mechanism (NMCM) has expressed concerns about some issues on the campaign trail ahead of the December 9th, 2015 General Election.
This comes despite three of the political parties would have signed a Code of Conduct on November 17th, which seeks to cause political parties to pledge to, among other things, fostering democracy through peaceful, free and fair elections, promote human rights and promote violence free elections.
A statement from the NMCM states that among the concerns are that the schedule of meetings from the political parties was not always forthcoming on a timely manner; the deploying of police officers to some political meetings was inadequate; and the choices of venues for meeting needs to be reviewed to avoid unnecessary traffic congestion.
In light of these concerns, the NMCM is recommending that police officers should be more proactive in carrying out their roles and functions as it relates the direction of traffic and keeping the peace; and candidates and platform speakers need to appeal for peace and calm and avoid threatening language and inciting violence.
Persons hosting programmes for political parties are also being admonished to refrain from demonizing candidates of opposing political parties by lying or mudslinging or entertaining gutter or mud politics.
