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Report on unacceptable aspects of mobile registration exercise in Harare North
Trudy Stevenson
July 29, 2007

1. Lack of information on the exercise

This mobile voter registration exercise has been given very little publicity by government. As far as I am aware, there was only one publication of the schedule of dates and places where the registration teams would be available, on Saturday 16 June in the Herald. There was no dissemination of this vital information on TV or radio, as far as I am aware. My own team distributed flyers and put up posters alerting constituents of the exercise, but some were threatened with arrest for distributing these flyers!

2. Impeding young people to obtain their national IDs and register as voters

It has been reported to me on numerous occasions that young people are being turned away, either on the grounds that "ink has run out" for their national ID, or because they cannot prove that they are staying with their parents, even if they produce a letter from the parent certifying that indeed the young family members are living at home - for example at Hallingbury Primary School on Sunday 15 July.

3. Chaos and impossibility of registration at Hatcliffe Community Hall

The registration exercise at Hatcliffe Community Hall was so chaotic that people queued for entire days without being able to register, and the ink ran out as well, to worsen the situation.

This chaos was largely caused by a linked process whereby people registering to vote in Hatcliffe were also being promised stands in a new housing cooperative in the Nyasha Chikwinya housing cooperative association. When I visited Hatcliffe on Saturday 21 July, I found cooperative members registering newly registered voters on tables right outside the District Office next to the community hall, in full view of everyone. I am informed that members were told that if they brought 6 (some say 5) new voters from wherever to register in Hatcliffe, they would get a stand. Some of people registering said they came from Mabvuku, Domboshawa and Norton - all outside Harare North.

The queues were controlled by ZanuPF members, who are reported to have prevented known MDC members from registering or checking the voters roll. Some were handled very roughly, even though they had babies on their backs.

This is a clear and blatant exercise in rigging the voters roll, in my view. I forwarded this information to ZESN immediately, and I understand they have a made follow-up visit. My own personal assistant, Brighton Chiwola, was arrested on Thursday 26 July, the last day of the exercise in Hatcliffe, for taking pictures with my camera of the chaotic queues so that he could provide evidence to support a request for the period of voter registration to be extended. He was held for over 24 hours, my camera was damaged and photographs destroyed including many family photographs, and he was physically and verbally attacked by police for being MDC. Clearly the aim of arresting him was to destroy evidence of the chaos in Hatcliffe. This is strange, since any reasonable organization seeking to register voters would welcome evidence that people were so keen to register that the exercise needed to be extended!

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