Mugabe and the Zim poll farce

| Tuesday August 6, 2013 00:00

Of course, there was no way the 89-year old wily fox could lose for as long as he breathes. There were complaints about the playing field not being level right from the beginning and the crafty Zimbabwean leader, Robert Mugabe, knew that his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was too trusting and wet behind the ears to call his bluff and SADC too complaisant towards the old geezer to listen to reason.Typical of Mugabe cunning, on July 30 - a day before the elections - electoral laws were brazenly violated when the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), which is unashamedly aligned to the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), failed to make the voters' roll available for inspection.

But in terms of the law, 'The Zimbabwe Electoral Act states that the Commission (ZEC) shall, within a reasonable period of time, shall provide the voters roll and provision of copies to political parties and indeed any interested groups or individuals.' Manipulation of the voters' roll began much earlier when millions of youths, a demographic inclined to the MDC, were disenfranchised by simply excluding them from registration.  By contrast, in a country with one of the world's lowest life expectancies, thousands of centenarians were registered.  In the week before the elections, this degenerate list included the names of people long dead while others were utterly imaginary.

And so Mugabe and his band of megalomaniacs have a new five-year term at the helm of a country brought back from the precipice by the participation of Tsvangirai in the Government of National Unity that was cobbled by SADC after another rigged poll in 2008 that was characterised by violence.  Pegged by ZEC at 61 percent, Mugabe has more than the two-thirds majority necessary to do as he pleases, including fiddle with the Constitution, and the support of the AU and SADC to claim legitimacy. Predictably, eager to appease after recent run-ins with the aging masquerader, South African president Jacob Zuma has congratulated Mugabe and called on all political parties in Zimbabwe to accept the so-called results as an expression of the will of the people. That is why we agree with the observer missions that have concluded that the Zimbabwean elections were an exercise in fraud at state level. 

That is the reason we agree with Tsvangirai that the poll was a farce and a coup by ballot.  He says he will seek redress in the courts, but we ask him not to be too optimistic. He also says it is not up to the opposition to sound the clarion call of revolution but trusts that revolution will spring from the masses.  We are not sure about the wisdom of such a stance because revolution is not totally impulsive and spontaneous but must be orchestrated by disciplined cadres who have a clear vision of the end in sight.  The ball is thus in their court.Today's thought

'There is no doubt that what has ben revealed so far by our observers cannot be considered as an acceptable of standard for free and fair elections in SADC.'

                                             - Phandu Skelemani on Zim elctions