By CHUSA SICHONE? –

A SWEDISH election conflict management advisor has said dialogue plays a pivotal role in avoiding electoral violence.
European Centre for Electoral Support (ECES) election conflict management advisor Victoria Florinder said this in an interview on the sidelines of the Leadership and Conflict Management for Electoral Stakeholders workshop in Lusaka yesterday.
Zambia is one of the 14 Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries where the workshop is being conducted.
Ms Florinder said addressing electoral violence could not be done single-handedly as it required multi-stakeholder involvement to deal with.
‘‘It is almost impossible to nominate one group as sorely responsible for dealing with these issues.
Therefore, I would like to call on a dialogue, an exchange and forums where different stakeholders should come together and not only keep to the confines of their own?organisation,’’ she said.
‘‘That for me is the most concrete recipe for preventing electoral violence that I do have, dialogue, even the perpetrators,’’ she said.
Ms Florinder said there was need for civil society organisations and political parties to dialogue on electoral violence, adding that Zambia had a fertile ground for dialogue but that needed to be enhanced.
She said Zambia was chosen as one of the workshop beneficiary countries because it had not been spared by electoral violence.
Ms Florinder said the workshop was meant to enhance capacity to deal with conflict management and leadership and that it was one step of several steps to be taken to enhance, adopt and sharpen leadership and conflict management skills.
On voter apathy, Ms Florinder cited ‘‘political fatigue’’ as one potential contributing factor to eligible voters desisting from voting.
She urged the electorate to identify key issues which they wanted political parties to address once they were in power and study their respective manifestoes in a bid to identify the key issues.
‘‘And it’s also up to political parties to communicate. That’s what they are doing during campaigns but unfortunately they speak about lack of quality of the other party,’’ she said.
Ms Florinder said political campaigns were one way of sensitisation but some political parties were not doing that as they were not basing their campaigns on issues but were instead wasting their time on blame-game.
The workshop, which has attracted participants from the Electoral Commission of Zambia, civil society organisations and the Police, among others, will run from September 22 to 26, 2014.