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Mugabe fighting to postpone defeat
Liberty Mupakati, The Zimbabwe Times
April 07, 2008

http://thezimbabwetimes.com/page881.htm

The ruling Zanu-PF party definitely lost the March 29 elections, while President Robert Mugabe was thoroughly thrashed by opposition Movement for Democratic Change leasder, Morgan Tsvangirai. The delay in announcing the election results confirms this.

Having worked in the Civil Service in Zimbabwe and having taken part in the election processes that were being run under the aegis of the much maligned and discredited Tobaiwa Mudede, I find it inconceivable that the newly constituted Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) is coming up with flimsy excuses to justify their utter failure to announce the victor in the Presidential elections.

The real reason why the results have not been released is to enable Mugabe and his party to explore alternatives, specifically to increase the number of votes that he received in the just ended elections. Forget the mantra about Morgan Tsvangirai failing to attain the 50 percent plus 1 majority that would curtail the need for a run-off. Forget everything that Zanu-PF is saying to the contrary, such as the absurd claims that MDC bribed election officials. Even die hard Zanu-PF people talk openly about Mugabe having comprehensively lost to Tsvangirai.

As I write members of the top echelons of ZEC are more or less under house arrest as they are not allowed to leave the cosy confines of their hotel which also doubles up as the collation centre and are literally under CIO guard 24/7.

I find it absurd that Utoile Saigwana, a former education officer in the Army Education Corps, with little or negligible experience in running elections, has the audacity and temerity to attribute the delay to the difficult terrain that they have to access to get the results from the various polling stations in the country, citing as an example Binga District. What I find difficult to understand is why they were previously able to get the results from these same areas without any trouble when the elections were in favour of Mugabe?

It beggars belief that Saigwana could tell such a white lie when he is fully aware that this statement cannot withstand any scrutiny and that there are people in ZEC who know that this is patently untrue. He would have saved himself from ridicule by asking Japhet R Murenje, ZEC's Director of Polling Logistics and Ignatius Mushangwe, the Director of Training who between them, have run several elections in their former capacities as Provincial Registrars for Mashonaland East and Masvingo Provinces respectively. In those ancient times, elections were not transported to district centres, but were counted at the polling stations and results relayed to the district and provincial centres, either by telephone or radio.

The then PTC would commandeer telephone lines from other establishments to the district and provincial centres that were dubbed "hotlines" as they could not be used to make any telephone calls to other numbers. Where there no were telephones, results were transmitted to the various centres through DDF and ZRP radio systems. In this day and age of mobile phone technology and with Zimbabwe being touted as one of the fastest growing markets for mobile phones in Sub-Saharan Africa, it would be treasonous to let Saigwana and Lovemore Sekeramayi (formerly Deputy Registrar General) get away with such lame excuses.

The CMED would also commandeer all government vehicles and hire others from parastatals for use during the elections and these were at the disposal of logistics teams, whose remit was to move around the polling stations in a constituency collecting results and taking them to the nearest centre where there was a telephone.

Zimbabweans know that the reason why the election results are being held up is to enable Mugabe to prevent the winner of those elections from winning an outright majority. They also know that the people who have been running the election machinery are the same despite the change of name.

They also need to know that the National Collation Centre is the same as the National Elections Directorate (National Command Centre) that is staffed by Mariyawanda Nzuwa, the Chairman of the Public Service Commission, Tobaiwa Mudede, Defence Forces Commander, Costantine Chiwenga and his Chief of Staff, Major-General Martin Chedondo, Air Force Chief, Perence Shiri, Police Chief, Augustine Chihuri, the Secretary of Local Government, Patson Mbiriri and his two deputies, Killian Mupingo, in charge of Local Authorities and Fanuel Mukwaira, in charge of Traditional Leaders, (chiefs and headmen), Secretary of Home Affairs, November Melusi Mtshiya, CIO Director General, Happyton Bonyongwe, Fortune Zengeni, the Officer Commanding Support Unit, and Godwin Matanga as well as the ZEC senior staffers (Chiweshe, Saigwana, Murenje and Mushangwe) and a host of other senior staffers from the President's Office.

The public should also know that the intimate and minute details of the elections are discussed by a cabal of military officers without the knowledge of the civilian staff as the current sidelining of Murenje and Mushangwe attests to. This same structure is replicated at the provincial and district levels, with provincial and district administrators chairing them, although during the 2002 presidential elections, this situation was tenuous as the CIO and the military, with the tacit approval of the highest office in the land, were flexing their muscles and I am told that any civilian staff that remain in the election machinery is only for window dressing purposes as real power rests with the CIO and the military staff seconded to these committees.

I would imagine that by now the provincial and district structures have been disbanded and that the staff that would have been seconded to the elections has since returned to their normal places of work, leaving only a skeleton staff to wind up the process.

I can testify that late on Sunday I was informed by one of these officials that Mugabe had been beaten by Tsvangirai by 57,8 percent of the poll to 39,9 percent. Armed with these results Chiwenga, Chihuri, Bonyongwe, Shiri and Paradzai Zimondi of prisons then approached Mugabe at State House. Mugabe, in a state of shock, sent them back to Chiweshe to ask him to reverse the result. Chiweshe told them he was bound by his professional ethics as a lawyer and could not reverse the election result. They pleaded with him to try his best to save the situation. Chiweshe tried his best - the results of the presidential election have not been announced since then - for a week.

I participated in three elections in Zimbabwe in various capacities and to the best of my knowledge results are always relayed, first to the district centres which in turn forwarded them to the provincial centres for onward transmission to the national command centre.

In those days, there was no mobile phone coverage in most parts of the country, yet results were always religiously announced by Mudede on ZTV throughout the night without fail and we would almost always know the winner of the elections within 18 to 24 hours of the close of polling.

The current prolonged delay in announcing the election results is a clear testament that Robert Mugabe lost the lections and that Zanu PF is using this window to strategize. Witness how, its foot soldiers, the war vets were hastily commandeered to march in the streets of Harare without any hindrance from the police, immediately before the Politburo meeting on Friday. They were commanded by Jabulani Sibanda who apparently was recently allocated a beautiful house in Borrowdale and a four-by-four vehicle. The march itself is an ominous precursor of the intimidation that is going to be brought to bear on the courageous people of Zimbabwe for having had the valour to vote for change.

Zimbabweans are now confronted by, perhaps, a first in the world, a situation where a defeated incumbent refuses to accept defeat and insists on presiding and crafting his way back into power through the back door.

I saw, first hand how the whole state machinery was rolled out in full and brute force to subdue the will of the people and cajole as well as coax them to vote for Mugabe. After the near defeat of Zanu-PF in the 2000 parliamentary elections, a new department was created in the Ministry of Local Government, the department for Traditional Leadership (Chiefs and Headmen) and this became the basis of enlisting the village headmen and chiefs- services to work for Zanu-PF. In an instant, village headmen became salaried officers of Rural District Councils and in the presidential elections, were required to ensure that their "subjects" voted for Mugabe.

They were made to queue according to villages and were called into polling booths to vote according to villages. It is likely that Zanu-PF is going to revert to this same method in its bid to remain in office. Part of the 2002 strategy was also to attach a war veteran to each village who was meant to act as their chaperone. Local government administration was rolled back to the early 1980s when hoards of war veterans were employed as Local Government Promotion Officers, a meaningless job whose real purpose was the propagation of Zanu-PF ideas and propaganda, albeit at no cost to the party, as their salaries were met by the state. Post the 2000 referendum, soldiers and war veterans were hired to act as Administrative Officers although in real essence, they were and still are Zanu PF commissars.

Mutasa was quoted in the local and international press last week as saying that Zanu-PF would be challenging results of 16 constituencies because the MDC had allegedly bribed ZEC officials.

This is a blatant lie. There is such thorough vetting (by both the ZRP and CIO to ascertain where their political loyalties lie) of all people who are engaged, especially at constituency registrar level. Zanu-PF actually sits in the planning meetings through their Provincial Chairman, Provincial Women-s League Chairwoman, Youth Chair and this is replicated at the district level with the District Coordinating Committee Chairman sitting in the planning meetings. I know of several people whose appointments to the role of either Constituency Registrar or Senior Polling Officer were vetoed by Zanu-PF officials and in the rare occasions that they would have made it to the next level, by the Governor as he had the final say.

I simply cannot imagine that anyone would slip through the net especially now, given the militarization of the civil service and how everything has to be run through the President's office, even in districts and provinces.

Furthermore, such appointments are made at the provincial level and with the tight security that exists in polling centres and constituency offices; I doubt that anyone would endanger their life by tampering with the figures as Mutasa would glibly want us to believe. In my experiences, I found it was always the other way round, as figures tended to be inflated in the presence of members of the National Elections Directorate led by Mariyawanda Nzuwa. The modus operandi was that if there were fears that a Zanu-PF candidate was at risk of losing an election, these chiefs would land in their helicopter and frighten the hell out of the polling officers who would just watch as the deed was done.

Nzuwa, by virtue of being the Public Service Commission chairman, could make or break a career and many a career was broken during elections and conversely others made it to the top, thanks to toeing the line. He instilled fear in any civil servant and his word carried the day. The presence of military officers in full military regalia did not help matters.

In the 2000 parliamentary elections, Dr Sydney Sekeramayi won against Didimus Munhenzva of the MDC courtesy of this method. He had lost the election and was declared the winner by a margin of only 10 votes. As for the 2002 Presidential elections, handichatauri (I need not go into detail). The same situation is repeating itself, especially with the results that have been announced in parliamentary elections in Uzumba and Maramba. Jerry Gotora, he of the Campfire and Local Government Association fame hails from there and unless he has recently retired, was the Council Chairman of UMP Rural District Council. Need I say more?

Now that there is likely to be a run-off, the MDC should be extra vigilant to the spectre of ghost voters. In the referendum elections of 12/13 February 2000, I was aware of many Zimbabweans who were already in exile but were said to have voted. Impeccable sources have told me that there already is a team trawling though the records to ensure that there is a large number of "Diaspora votes" for Mugabe.

"Your Governor"", Gideon Gono and the holder of the Western Union franchise in Zimbabwe, are said to be critical players in this plan as they are allegedly playing an integral role in the remittance industry. Gono has a vested interest in the outcome of this election, specifically the possible departure of Mugabe as he has amassed enormous wealth beyond anyone-s wildest dreams.

His interests are predominantly in the lucrative horticultural sector. Of all of Zimbabwe-s economic sectors this sector enjoys the most favourable benefits from the foreign currency retention policy. I need not explain that the author of these economic and monetary policies is, of course, none other than "Your Governor".

Is there conflict of interest here? The foreign currency retention policy is hugely skewed in favour of the horticultural industry because Gono owns a swathe of farms that transcend both Mashonaland East along Shamva Road, Chabwido Farm in the Enterprise area and in Bromley next to Surrey Farm). He also owns the magnificent Kintyre Estates along the Bulawayo Road, just before the Norton turn-off. He subsided this vast estate and let out sections to fellow indigenous entrepreneurs and friends.

He continues to export horticultural produce to the EU through some unscrupulous middlemen who are resident in the UK and the Netherlands in clear breach of the EU trade policies with members of the Zanu-PF regime. Gono knows that he stands to lose everything should, as expected; an MDC government come to power. He would rather, work strenuously hard for the maintenance of the status quo, hence his decision to play a role in the Diaspora vote.

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