The National Electoral Commission (NEC) will today stop receiving candidatures for parliamentary elections slated for September 16.The aspirants started submitting their detail on August 6. Individual candidates as well as those for special interest groups have so far submitted their candidatures. The special interest groups are women, the youth and people with disabilities, who are allocated 24 seats, two seats and one seat, respectively. All these groups elect their representatives through electoral colleges.According to the NEC Executive Secretary, Charles Munyaneza, a total of 91 candidatures from the independent and special interest groups had been submitted by close of business yesterday.“We have as of now received two political parties that submitted their lists of candidates, two independent candidates, 67 women candidates, 11 youth and 11 candidates of people with disabilities,” Munyaneza told The New Times yesterday. Parties readyPolitical parties have since Friday been submitting lists of their nominated candidates, who together with the independents, will compete for the 53 parliamentary seats through universal adult suffrage. The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) took the lead among political parties to submit its list of candidates on Friday. “We submitted a list of 80 candidates. Among them 72 are RPF members while the other eight slots were allocated to candidates from parties that we are in a coalition with,” said Francois Ngarambe, the Secretary-General of RPF. PS Imberakuri submitted its list to NEC yesterday.According to the party’s leader, Christine Mukabunani, her party is ready for the campaigns. “The list we submitted is composed of 65 candidates. So far, we are set for the elections, we have printed banners that we will use in the campaigns and are assured of support countrywide,” said Mukabunani. Social Democratic Party (PSD) and Liberal Party (PL) are set to submit their lists to NEC today morning. “We have just approved our final list of 69 candidates which we intend to submit to NEC tomorrow (today) morning. We had many but during our vetting process we picked out those who had complete dossiers,” said the chairperson of PL, Protais Mitali.Formality issuesPSD chairperson Vincent Biruta also said the tentative list that he would be submitting to NEC today morning is made up of 80 candidates. “We have been preparing the list, some of the members opted to change and contest in special categories in that case we had to update our list but we are submitting the final one tomorrow (today) morning,” said Dr Biruta. Meanwhile, the newly registered political party, Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, could not confirm whether they will take part in the elections or not. According to the electoral law, depending on the number of votes a political party garners, the candidates are selected from the list in ascending order. This means that the candidate at the top has the highest chance to make it to Parliament.
