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Senator Komichi a victim of ZEC’s negligence
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T)
August 28, 2013

The arrest and prosecution of the MDC national deputy chairperson and Senator-elect, Morgen Komichi is an attempt by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to divert attention after the electoral body failed to run credible elections in July.

This was raised today by Senator Komichi’s lawyer, Alec Muchadehama during the cross examination of Utoile Silaigwana, the ZEC deputy chief elections officer at the Harare Magistrates’ Courts.

Senator Komichi was arrested in July after handing over an envelope with special vote ballot papers that was found dumped in a dustbin at the Harare International Conference Centre. “There were serious leakages during the special voting exercise at ZEC that the police at some polling stations hijacked the process and the accused was a victim of that,” said Muchadehama.

“The accused went to ZEC to ask them to intervene but ZEC sought to divert attention from itself and the chaos it was creating causing the arrest of the accused. How ZEC conducted the last election is a classical story of how not to run an election,” he said.

During the cross examination, Silaigwana failed to respond to a number of questions raised by the defence counsel on the number of people who had voted through the special vote, those who failed to do so, why the police had taken over from ZEC the voting process and the irregular issuances of ballot papers.

“All in all ZEC was not ready to hold the special vote on July 14 and 15 neither was it ready to hold the July 31 harmonised elections,” said Muchadehama.

The trial continues tomorrow morning.

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