"Residue was bitterly poisoned," argue Chamisa lawyer - asked to test not taste to prove it W Mukori

A picture is worth a thousand words.' Sometimes, so too can a headline!

“Chamisa's bungling lawyer says, 'You can't expect fresh water from a salty well'” screamed the headline in Bulawayo 24. Everybody who had followed Zimbabwe’s rigged 2018 elections knew immediately who the bungling lawyer was, Advocate Thabani Mpofu.

The people of Zimbabwe have risked life and limb to elect Nelson Chamisa and his MDC friends into power on the promise they would bring about the democratic changes the nation has been dying for. They have had many golden opportunities to deliver on their promise, notable during the 2008 to 2013 GNU, but they have wasted each and every one of these opportunities.

Nelson Chamisa, Tendai Biti, the now late Morgan Tsvangirai, David Coltart, Welshman Ncube and all the other MDC leaders past and present have all shown that they are not just corrupt and incompetent; they are breathtakingly so! In the recent Con-Court challenge of the election result, it was MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa’s, who was the applicant in the case, legal team’s turn to show the world breathtakingly incompetent they were. And they did!

Just to bring the reader back up to speed on the case. The elections should have never taken place, not without first implementing the democratic reforms designed to stop Zanu PF rigging the elections. Chamisa and the rest in the opposition were warned of the folly of going into the elections with no reforms in place but they paid no heed.

So the elections went ahead without even something as basic as a clean and verified voters’ roll, that is the level of the level of opposition fools we are dealing with here. Lo behold, Zanu PF blatantly rigged the elections. The party won 2/3 majority in parliament and the party’s presidential candidate, Emmerson Mnangagwa, was declared the winner of the presidential race.

Nelson Chamisa, the MDC Alliance presidential candidate and main challenger challenged the presidential results, accusing the body running the elections, ZEC, of rigging the elections in favour of Emmerson Mnangagwa. Although there were many things such ZEC’s failure to produce verified voters’ roll, ZEC producing three differing sets of vote counts, etc. suggesting the election process was not clean and fair, to say the least; the case collapsed because none of these irregularities were supported by the evidence in the seal ballot boxes. The ballot boxes were never opened.

Chamisa’s lawyers bungled big time in failing to have the sealed ballot boxes opened!

The case collapsed after judges insisted that only primary evidence, which included opening the ballot boxes, would have provided sufficient evidence to prove the alleged results tampering and vote-rigging claims. Chamisa's lead lawyer Advocate Thabani Mpofu (TM) differed with the learned judges, and recently spoke to our reporter, Blessed Mhlanga (ND), on the "fulcrum and pith" of the matter that his team brought before the courts.

“You were the lead lawyer in the case, which was eventually dismissed with costs because you had no evidence to show rigging. Why didn't you seek the residue (information from the sealed ballot boxes)?” News Day reporter, Blessing Mhlanga, asked Advocate Mpofu.

“The residue was bitterly poisoned,” replied Advocate Mpofu. “A lot of things had happened after the poll, most of them well-documented. The intention was to conceal the theft, but it was clumsily prosecuted. We placed evidence of such interference before the court and all reasonably informed Zimbabweans know about the efforts to interfere with the ballot boxes.

“You could not expect fresh water to spring from a salty well. Both the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) and Zanu PF had tampered with the ballot boxes.”

“Further, once the Registrar refused to issue our subpoena, we decided that we were to concentrate on showing that Mnangagwa had not won the elections and in showing that he had not won the election, we had to concentrate on Zec's own numbers.

“Never mind that you cannot practically get the residue within seven days and our courts have effectively held as much, we had so many numbers to deal with, but the incontestable one was the difference between the presidential and parliamentary elections, which was 40 717 and the numbers that we had to knock off was just over 31 000 to force a run-off, so once we established that and there has been no answer to those discrepancies, that was sufficient in my view. How could it not be? Zec had changed its results three times over!”

So the dispute was over the figures; where did ZEC get the addition 40 717 votes. Since both sides claim that their figure is the correct one; it made perfect sense to demand that the alternative source of the data, the sealed ballot boxes, must be opened to settle the matter. It was for the applicant to demand that the sealed boxes must be opened.

To argue that the seal ballot boxes had already been tampered without submitting any such evidence is just childish!

Even if the contents of the sealed ballot boxes had indeed been tampered; it was for applicant to produce their copy of the signed V11 form, giving a summary of the vote count at each station, saying one thing and the original V11 in the sealed box saying something else. It was then for the Judges, not the applicant, to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence before them.

If the Registrar deed indeed refuse to issue subpoena and thus denying you access to have the seal ballot boxes. Did he/she say why? Where is the evidence of this?

There have been rumours alleging not all V11 forms were issued as is required by law. If this was the case then why did Chamisa not say so.

Tendai Biti was quick off the mark and announced that Chamisa had won with 61% of the votes but would not say how many votes.

Whilst Chamisa has maintained that he won the elections and had “a very strong case to prove it” no one in MDC Alliance has ever come up with the concrete evidence. The party has criticized ZEC’s figures but without ever giving an detailed figures of the own. It was shocking that Chamisa has failed to submit all the V11 forms with his court challenge casting serious doubt on whether the party all the forms.

There is no doubt that by the time V11 were issues most of the vote rigging was done.

There is no doubt that Zanu PF rigged this year’s elections. How can these elections ever be judged free, fair and credible when there was no free public media? When 2 to 3 million Zimbabweans in the diaspora were denied a vote for no better reason than that Zanu PF feared most of them would vote for the opposition. When ZEC failed to produce a verified voters’ roll throwing the door open to blatant multiple voting as the analysis of cast votes show, etc.

The focus of Chamisa’s Con-Court case was challenging the presidential election result declared by ZEC as contrast to his own figure obtained from the V11 forms collected by the MDC Alliance elections agents. Whilst there is circumstantial evidence to suggest there was rigging; the opportunity to have this confirmed was lost, because the applicant failed to get the ballot boxes opened.

“You could not expect fresh water to spring from a salty well!” Your task, Mr Mpofu, was to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the water was indeed salty and not just say so!