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Election adversaries share platform
Bulawayo Agenda
March 10, 2008

Background
With the 2000 parliamentary elections and 2002 Presidential election having been hotly disputed, the 2005 parliamentary election attracted mixed reactions from Zimbabweans. While some thought that it would be the panacea to Zimbabwe's problems others quickly dismissed it as a damp squib. They had lost confidence in the whole electoral process. The post election period also brought a lot of tension with Zanu PF having won 78 seats, the MDC 41 seats and the other seat being snatched by an independent candidate professor Jonathan Moyo. The MDC and Zanu PF are still miles apart and are likely to remain so. There is no transition to marvel at. It is still the same old story of deprivation and retrogression. The election result is a harbinger of tougher times to come for Zimbabwe. Mugabe`s landslide win spells disaster for Zimbabwe, no food, no fuel, and no jobs for the unemployed. The election outcome further complicates the political log jam that has been the hallmark of Zimbabwean politics over the past five years. Dialogue has failed in the past and there is no indication that it will succeed now. The situation becomes more complex with the MDC refusing to accept the result of the poll which they say was rigged. The more militant fringe in the MDC are limbering for street protests. Ordinary Zimbabweans wait to see how the political, social and economic environment will unfold. It is against this background of political confusion and uncertainty that Bulawayo Agenda provided a platform for the civic leaders and NGO operatives to converse and reviewing the elections.

Concept analysis
The thrust of the conversation was to deliberate on the just ended parliamentary elections, the outcome, ascertain whether they were free and fair and map possible strategies for the future. The general agreement was that the elections were not free and fair because of several reasons which include the following.

Compromised electoral structures
The institutional framework remains defective. Military and intelligence officers continue to serve on the electoral supervisory commission which is appointed by and is answerable to the executive. The national command centre is a gaping black hole while the ZEC is fatally compromised. The delimitation committee deliberately eliminated safe MDC constituencies and made others marginal. The election machinery was in gear only a month before the election raising eyebrows as to whether the commission owned the elections. While the inspection of the voter's role for the election was closed on 4 February 2005, the ZEC, which in terms of the electoral act is obliged to supervise the registration and inspection process was only established two days before the closing date. The electoral court bowed down to pressure and interference from the executive in the Chimanimani case.

Electoral reforms
The electoral reforms introduced were woefully inadequate. They left the process susceptible to manipulation by the executive and the ruling party. With the pro-ruling party police and troops appointed as the only electoral officers, opposition election agents found themselves denied entry to the polling booths where ballots were being counted. In the urban constituencies legally wise MDC candidates were able to challenge these illegal restrictions and gain access but not in the rural polling stations. In rural areas the counting took place with only the government electoral officers and Zanu PF candidates and agents present, making manipulation of figures easy.

Unfair media coverage
The state media while allowing occasional appearance of opposition spokesmen in the final weeks of campaigning , churned out a diet of Zanu PF propaganda and hate speech – not to mention transparent lies directed at the opposition. The public media was embarrassingly one-sided and was used to support the status quo and to vilify perceived enemies of the ruling party. The closure of the country's only daily independent, The Daily News and at least thee other papers on spurious grounds by the politically compromised Media Information Commission further threw the deck in favour of the ruling party. In addition several journalists were arrested under the infamous Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA).

Politicisation of traditional leaders
In a desperate bid to win the favour of chiefs the governmant put in place a vehicle purchase scheme for chiefs and hiked allowances for traditional leaders. It then oriented chiefs and kraal heads to hate their subjects because of their political choice. The ruling party indirectly declared a one-party state in the rural areas where it knew that the people were gullible and could be intimidated easily. They would first have meetings with chiefs and kraal heads where they told to come up with strategies of intimidating the electorate into voting for Zanu PF. Kraal heads were instructed to hold village meetings where they lied about the use of translucent ballot boxes and because counting of votes would be done at the same polling station it was easy to know who one voted for. Villagers were told that it was a punishable offence not to vote and voting meant putting an X on a Zanu PF candidate.

Politicisation of food
ZANU PF also used poverty as an instrument of coercion. Several foreign relief agencies operating in the country scaled back operations or completely withdrew depriving particularly rural people of humanitarian aid because of the threat of the NGO bill and interference from the government. With the people faced with starvation ZANU PF took the opportunity to deprive MDC supporters of food as it now had monopoly over distribution of food. The ruling party deliberately gave out food at exactly the same time when the MDC was having its rallies. This was to stop people from attending MDC rallies and deprive those who would have attended the rally, food.

Voter turnout
The voter turnout, piles of spoilt ballots and an unprecedented number of voters turned away are a clear indication that there was no thorough voter education. Most people were turned away because they tried to vote in wrong constituencies, some did not have relevant identification documents or did not appear on the voters role while others were not legally Zimbabwean citizens. The late publication of the list of polling stations generated confusion among the electorate especially those out of towns and cities. While deliberately disenfranchising thousands of civil servants, the military police, intelligence officers and ambassadors voted a week before while others ‘voted from their graves’.

Statistics
These have become the most vulnerable and unreliable form of determinant, particularly because these are susceptible to manipulation and easily convert into counterfeit data often employed to achieve an end. Zimbabwe`s bureaucracy has become a master of using counterfeit data to prolong the lifespan of a moribund regime.

Monitoring and observation
When inviting monitors and observers the government avoided all who criticised its undemocratic tendencies. It invited friends who failed to give a fair and objective assessment of the electoral process. The ANC and some SADC observers had already judged the elections as a free and fair contest long before the ballot papers were marked. In addition to that observers only came a few days before the election and most spent their time in hotels instead of going to the rural areas where people were being dehumanised by Zanu PF.

Recommendations

• Lobby for a new constitution
• Serious mobilization and conscientisation
• Pressurize the government to open airwaves
• Allow other groups e.g religious groups to engage in voter education
• Lobby the SADC and other international players to pressurize the regime to democratize

Conclusion
Having agreed that the elections were not free and fair and that there was gross violation of the SADC principles two schools of thought emerged. One argued that there was a constitutional crisis and the constitution had to be changed first before any elections take place because with the present constitution the ruling party would always have an unfair advantage. However others thought that there was no way that the present government would allow a people driven constitution, the first port of call was therefore to create the democratic space.

N.B. The views expressed on this paper represent the opinions of the participants who attended the focus group conversation on the 13^th of April 2005.

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