J Moyo's Excelgate, to "expose how elections were rigged" - rubbish, don't learn tango from fiddler crab W Mukori

“A NEW case study done by exiled former cabinet minister Jonathan Moyo, a political science professor, in collaboration with publisher Ibbo Mandaza, under his Southern African Political Economy Trust (Sapes), reveals how last year’s presidential election was systematically rigged by state institutions for President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa,” reported The Zimbabwe Independent.

“The detailed monograph which will be released soon as a book to be published by Sapes exposes the mechanism used to manipulate the vote dubbed “Excelgate”.

One of the common criticisms of last year’s election is that the whole election process from start to finish was full of errors one could not trace or verify anything! If the extracts from the book are anything to go by, then instead of the book bringing clarity it is muding the muddy waters!

“The completion of fresh V.11s, which occurred after the authorities realised that Chamisa had won the presidential election by 66% of the vote, with Mnangagwa getting 33%, based on the results that Zec had received through its server in the morning of 31 July 2018 after which it commenced a bogus verification exercise at its National Command Centre with ‘a group of people, in excess of 20, punching in what was identified as V.11 data into an Excel spreadsheet’ for a period of two days,” reads one extract from the Book.

“Against the backdrop of the evidence that has been presented in this monograph, this culminated in the massive rigging of the result of the 2018 presidential election.”

66% of what? How does the Server total compare to the Excel spreadsheet total?

We are told that MDC had election agents at 10 985 Polling Stations and no agents at the remaining 518 station. So MDC had 95.5% of the original election data, the same data that was down loaded on the Server. MDC must have done their own addition, one does not need a massive computer to add 10 985 figures adding up to less than 5 million. No doubt, Professor Jonathan Moyo would have cross checked the figures and addition. The reader is to then assume that Chamisa won 66% of this vote count.

With no MDC agents at the remaining 518 Polling Stations there is no doubt that ZEC had the opportunity to tamper with the figures. Are we to believe that ZEC overturned the 66% Chamisa victory from the 10 985 stations using figured from the remaining 518 stations? There would have been more votes cast in the 518 stations than were cast in the 10 985 stations!

Professor Jonathan Moyo’s book is clearly a waste of time, the work of one who have plenty of time to kill and is senile after nearly two years holed up in Kenya. We already know that election process cannot be traced and verified he is adding to the confusion by making his own claims that cannot be traced or verified. One will learn as much about tango dance from fiddler crabs than would learn about Zimbabwe’s 2018 rigged elections from reading Professor Moyo’s Excelgate!

We already know that Zanu PF blatantly rigged last year’s elections; the process was flawed and illegal and must be condemned. Zimbabwe has no legitimate government. 

We should be focusing all our time and energy in pressuring Zanu PF to step down so the country can appoint an interim administration to implement the reforms and end this curse of rigged elections. And not wasting it on trivial pursuits like watching fiddler crabs or worse still reading Jonathan Moyo’s Excelgate trash!