“The SADC Election Observer Mission to Zimbabwe
today announced the 2018 harmonised elections were not only peaceful, but were
in line with the revised SADC Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections,”
reported the Zanu PF controlled, Herald.
This must be FAKE news!
If this is true then Africa is doomed!
If President Mnangagwa and his junta are
allowed to stage a military coup and insist it was a military assisted
transition and therefore legal; we can be certain there will be more military
assisted transitions.
Eight months after the coup the junta holds
supposedly free, fair and credible elections and yet pointedly refuse to
implement even one democratic reform, everyone agreed at the onset of the 2008
to 2013 GNU were a pre-requisite to free and fair elections. And the elections
take place with no clean and verified voters’ roll.
Zimbabwe has spent the last five years
producing a new Biometric based Voting System (BVS), spending millions of
dollars buying the equipment and then spending many, many man-years registering
the voters. Come voting day, ZEC used a printed voters roll and the BVS was
discarded without even telling anyone!
The nation had switched to the BVS because the
manual system had been abused. It was quite common to find long dead people
still in the voters’ roll and, worse still, find they voted. An audit of the printed
voters’ roll has already shown that some individuals appear 20 times in the
roll!
Zanu PF has continued to spent billions of
dollars to bankroll its no-expense spared vote-buying and vote-rigging scheme.
Many of the country’s provincial hospitals do not have a reliable ambulance
service because of the decades of underfunding and yet Zanu PF candidates,
party leaders, Chiefs, etc. have all received brand new vehicles!
The votes were supposed to be counted at each
polling station and results declared there and then. The same results were then
supposed to be send to ZEC command centre in Harare, their task was to add up
the figures of each of the 60, maximum, polling stations in each constituency
and announce who was the winner. The counting of the ballots at the polling
station took 4 to 8 hours, by 3 am not polling station results were in.
It has taken ZEC 17 hours from the time results
started coming in for them to declare the result of the first 7 out of 210
constituency result. The figures simply do not add up but because it has been
impossible to challenge the result because ZEC has never reveal how many
polling station are in each constituency!
In the 2013 elections Zanu PF announce that the
number of polling stations would be increased from 2 000 to a staggering 9 000
just two days before voting started. This year the number of polling stations
gone up to over 11 000 and even then would add a further 1 000 plus stations.
No doubt, it is the vote counts from these ghost polling stations that are
making all the difference; turning a Zanu PF defeat into a landslide victory.
How can SADC election observers judge an
elections free, fair and credible when there no voters’ roll to be audited? The
election process has costed the nation an obscene amount of money, robbed from
the poorest of the poor, and the nation has nothing to show for it. The whole
process has been so flawed and illegal ZEC cannot tell anyone where it is
getting its figures that have turned Zanu PF defeat into a landslide victory.
By endorsing these flawed and illegal elections
as free, fair and credible SADC has opened a Pandora’s Box which will take a
generation to close, if at all. President Mnangagwa and his junta have just
shown that one can blatantly rig elections and, if need be, stage a military
assisted transition; SADC will rubber stamp the elections free and fair and
turn a blind eye to military coup.
Monkey see, monkey do!
My fellow Zimbabweans, you can forget about economic recovery because no foreign investor and lender wants to do business in a nation in which elections are rigged and the only way to have a change of government is through a military coup, violent street protest or some such violent process!
ZEC command centre is supposed to note the number of votes for each of the candidate in each constituency from all the 60 maximum polling stations for parliamentary and presidential candidates. From the result they would be able to declare the winner of each parliamentary seat.
ReplyDeleteFor the presidential candidate they would have to produce a list of what each of the 23 presidential candidate's vote in the 210 constituencies and from that declare the winner. Why these simple additions should now be dragging into two days, beggars belief!
The opposition has accused the commission of delaying the announcement, and the European Union observer mission has wondered openly why the presidential results were the first counted but the last to be shared publicly.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing new there! If you are going to cook up the figures you have to cover your tracks, that takes time!
This is the nightmare we should have avoided if the MDC had implemented the democratic reforms during the GNU or had listened to advice not to contest the elections without reforms.
ReplyDelete"MDC has stringent measures to stop Zanu PF rigging the elections!" Chamisa insisted. Yes Zanu PF thugs are answerable for the vote rigging and the mess that is now unfolding but MDC leaders like Tsvangirai, Biti, Chamisa, Ncube, Coltart, etc. cannot deny that they played their part in all these!
A person has been shot dead as police and soldiers in Harare clashed with opposition protesters amid a delay in announcing the winner of Zimbabwe's presidential election.
ReplyDeleteThis is the stuff nightmares are made of!
Who would want to invest a country in which elections are rigged, there is rioting and military coups are the only way to effect regime change!
President Mnangagwa and his junta have had to pull all the stops to blatantly rig these elections and some of their actions have been really embarrassing and the regime has never felt so low. The desperate acts such as the failure to produce verified voters' roll and the blatant cheating by ZEC failing to declare 21% of the polling station results, according to some sources, has left ZEC looking foolish as they could not explain where the got their figures.
ReplyDeleteZanu PF decided to withhold declaring the presidential result as long as possible in the hope that MDC supporters will bling first and resort to violence. The regime can then descend on the protestors, especially if they were to become violent, in the disguise of keeping law and order.
The regime was desperate for something to take attention away from the rigged elections.
It is much easier for the regime to confront MDC protestors protesting the regime's failure to release the presidential election result than those protesting rigged presidential results. By the same token the regime will be happier confronting violent protestors than peaceful ones.
MDC leaders' in their breath taking incompetence answered Zanu PF's prayers - the party supplied violent and drunk protestors protesting the late release of the presidential result. The regime had the perfect excuse to descent on MDC supporters like a tonne of bricks and from a great height!
Zanu PF will have state security on maximum alert to stop MDC violence, all protests will be considered potentially violent and so there will be no protest permitted from now own except pro-Zanu PF ones.
"We hold the opposition MDC Alliance and its whole leadership responsible for this disturbance of national peace, which was meant to disrupt the electoral process. Equally, we hold the party and its leadership responsible for any loss of life, injury or damage of property that arise from these acts of political violence which they have aided and abetted," he said.
ReplyDeleteThe President said the MDC Alliance leadership has to remove its violent supporters from the streets forthwith so that peace returns in the country.
"In asking them to take this necessary step, government is simply reminding them of their duties as responsible political players, and as citizens," said President Mnangagwa, adding that people must understand that in any electoral process, some win and others lose.
The irony is that by failing to hold free, fair and credible elections, President Mnangagwa and his junta have proven themselves to be worse hooligans than MDC leaders and their supporters. I condemn violent street protests but, let us be honest here, the death and destruction a violent mob will cause is nothing compared to the death and destruction President Mnangagwa has cause by rigging these elections alone.
The nation has wasted billions of dollars in cash and labour the holding of these elections and yet we have nothing to show for it because by rigging them he has rendered everything a waste. Worse still, by rigging these elections President Mnangagwa has just confirmed to the foreign investors and the world at large that Zimbabwe is still a pariah state ruled by vote-rigging thugs.
We can kiss goodbye to meaningful foreign and local investments to kick-start the much needed economic recovery; investors do not deal with thugs!
MDC leaders have again and again proven that they are corrupt and incompetent by staging these violent demonstrations MDC leaders have allowed President Mnangagwa to draw attention away from the more important matter of rigged elections to the more trivial matter of violent protests where then claimed the moral high ground.
"MDC Alliance MP elect Job Wiwa Sikhala' s house is under siege. Guns are barking outside his home as the military steps up efforts to stage a second coup within six months.
ReplyDeleteIf the report is true then this is just confirming that the nation has indeed started tumbling down over the edge of the precipice. Anyone out there who still thinks that President Mnangagwa's "Zimbabwe is open for business!" mantra will bring about any economic recovery is very naïve, indeed. By rigging the elections and now staging yet another military coup ED has just told the world "Zimbabwe is a pariah state ruled by vote rigging thugs!" No investor is his or her right mind will ever want to do business with thugs.
"Can we all pray for Sikhala right now? Lets continue to pray for the People's choice President Nelson Chamisa as he prepares to take over the Presidency of Zimbabwe. Nothing shall stop the will of the people anymore. Lets pray for a peaceful transition in our country," you say.
Are you not being very naïve here? Do you really believe this was another "operation bhora mushango" were people voted for a Zanu PF candidate but an opposition president as happened in 2008? If that was not the case, then I cannot see the Zanu PF thugs rigging the vote to secure a Zanu PF parliamentary majority but only to handover the presidency to Chamisa.
Even if the junta was to allow Chamisa to be president, do you really think he can ever get anything done or last for long with a 2/3 Zanu PF majority in parliament and the senate! I have heard of lame duck president, Chamisa will be a dead-in-the-water duck president.
Best course of action now is for these rigged elections to be declared null and void and an interim administration appointed that will be tasked to implement the democratic reforms agree at the onset of the 2008 GNU. There will be very little point in appointing MDC or Zanu PF leaders into this administration since they are the ones who failed to implement the reforms during the GNU.
@Eddie Cross
ReplyDelete"The hurdles in front of us are clear, first we must have a peaceful, well organized election on Monday with about 4 million people voting. A quick result in a transparent manner and acceptance by both main Parties of the result. That is hurdle one," you said.
"Then we need the endorsement of the results by key observers who have been here for the past two months and are well aware of all the nonsense that goes on behind our closed doors. If we fail to get that endorsement then we are in trouble because we need the international Community to, at the very least, say it was not perfect, many shortcomings, but the outcome was democratic and acceptable. Only then can we expect the kind of support we need for the new government to begin to repair the damage left behind by Mugabe. That is hurdle two."
By failing to produce a verified voters roll and then ZEC taking forever to announce the results, they had to cooking up the figure; Zimbabwe has fallen flat on its face on the first hurdle. Let us just say the fall was so bad there was real no point in considering the second and all the other remaining hurdles as failure to clear the earlier hurdle disqualifies one.
For the record MDC had the golden opportunity to get the democratic reforms implemented during the GNU. After five years they failed to get even one reform implemented because Mr Cross and company are breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent.
Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, Mr Cross and many of his MDC friends still fail to understand the seriousness of their selling-out during the GNU. By rigging these elections ED has forced many MDC politicians into retirement! Good riddance!