Keep your eyes on the ball - the rigged elections - protests are a tactical diversion Nomusa Garikai

“Below is a snap interview of former vice president Constantino Chiwenga early Thursday morning as he claimed that soldiers neither shot nor killed anyone in Harare yesterday. He spoke to ZimEye’s Simba Chikanza,” reported Zimeye.

In the audio recording, a voice is heard trying to explain why it could not have been the soldiers who shot and killed the three civilians.

President Mnangagwa and his junta government were under pressure for having failed to hold free, fair and credible elections. They needed something to draw attention away from the rigged elections and these violent protests were the bolt hole they wanted. The real tragedy here is that MDC fell for it.

When Minister of Home Affairs, Obert Mpofu, gave his press interview on Wednesday night, he took great pleasure in reminding the world of all the reported incidents of violence within MDC including the attack on Mai Khupe when she failed to attend the MDC Alliance launch! This is a regime that 8 months ago stage a military coup and is right now committing yet another act of high treason by blatantly rigging the elections but all that is chicken feed compared to MDC violence!

One hopes that the international election observers will not be so easily fooled by these Zanu PF antics. The observers must not take their eyes off the ball – the elections.

Dr Nkululeko Sibanda, MDC – Alliance presidential candidate, Nelson Chamisa’s spokesman told the press that there were “agent provocateurs” planted among the protestors. Surely this is something that MDC leaders should have anticipated!

There are reports showing that many of the protestors were high on alcohol and they had fuelled at the MDC HQ! How stupid and naïve was that!

The observers must condemn these elections; there is no way these elections can ever be judge free, fair and credible when there was no credible and verified voters’ roll. There is no doubt that there was something fishy going on here when ZEC failed to announce the results when their task was to add up the total of each candidate – the counting of the votes was all done at the polling stations.

“On Tuesday former MDC finance minister Tendai Biti and ZESN, the main domestic election monitor, said one in five polling stations — more than 2,000 in all — had not physically posted tallies on their doors, as required by law,” reported Spotlight Zimbabwe.

“Biti said the omission left room for the electoral commission, which ZESN and the opposition have accused of bias, to manipulate the results in favour of Mnangagwa and Zanu-PF.”

Like it or not, the failure to hold free, fair and credible elections and the violent street protest have all confirmed one thing – that Zimbabwe is still a pariah state ruled by thugs with a panache for rigging elections. No one, absolutely no one, is going to invest is the country because investors do not do business with thugs. They do not trust thugs!

By condemning these elections, the international elections will be doing the long suffering people of Zimbabwe a great favour; give the nation hope by providing a way out of this mess.

If the elections are condemn then Zanu PF will have no legitimacy to form the next government. This will open the door for the appointment of an interim administration that will implement the democratic reforms designed to dismantle the de facto one-party dictatorship and strip Zanu PF of all its carte blanche powers to rig elections.

"Army has been deployed, it is not a picnic!" twittered J Moyo - looking business end of AK 47 P Guramatunhu

"I repeat what I said in 2002: WHERE THE ARMY IS DEPLOYED, DON'T EXPECT A PICNIC. When the Army was deployed in 2008, it was not a picnic, it was a reversal of a poll result; and when it was deployed last Nov, it wasn't a picnic, it was a COUP!" Twittered Professor Jonathan Moyo.

Yes we know OH EVIL ONE, “Devil incarnate!” as the murderous tyrant, Robert Mugabe himself once called you. When the army was deployed in 2008, you saw nothing wrong. Indeed, as the regime’s minister of propaganda Professor Moyo has played his role in white-washing the corruption, vote rigging and thuggery that have taken place in the country dragging us to where we are today – standing on the edge of the abyss, hell-on-earth.

We are looking up the business end of a loaded shot-gun in the hands of a madman with a twitchy finger!

Let me say it here and now; this is one nightmare that this nation could and should have avoided. Former President Robert Mugabe, now President Emmerson Mnangagwa and all the other Zanu PF cronies and thugs are responsible for this nightmare. It was their insatiable greed for absolute power and the influence and wealth it brought that made them betray the revolutionary values of freedom, justice and human rights and dignity for all.

Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC friends must share the blame for the mess we are in. MDC had the golden opportunity to end the de facto Zanu PF dictatorship during the GNU, they sold-out and failed to get even one democratic reform implemented in five years!

MDC leaders were warned 100 000 times and 100 000 times again every month for the last five years not to take part in the elections without reforms but they would not listen.

“MDC has stringent measures to stop Zanu PF rigging the elections!” insisted MDC Alliance presidential candidate, Nelson Chamisa. No doubt, Chamisa has already gone into hiding leaving innocent Zimbabweans to AF 47 wielding madman with the twitchy finger alone!

SADC endorse ED coup and rigged elections, dawn of the rule of apes - monkey see, monkey do N Garikai

“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!