The real issue about the country’s forthcoming elections is not about the date, but the disenfranchisement of the voters that has been systematically taking place.
NewsDay Editorial
The July 31 date announced by President Robert Mugabe is part of that process.
Disenfranchisement, it must be borne in mind, can be done through the law, intimidation or by placing unreasonable demands on the applicant. Zanu PF has been using all of the above. We smelt a rat long back when Zanu PF, with its erstwhile blatant disregard of the rule of law, suddenly woke up and said it would abide by the Constitutional Court’s ruling to have elections by July 31. This is because the ruling aids its grand plan to disenfranchise voters as there would be limited time for proper voter registration and verification.
And in the thick of the sham voter registration exercise designed to revoke the rights of the people to vote is a man called Tobaiwa Mudede who happens to be the country’s Registrar-General. Mudede has ensured that the voters’ roll and voter registration remain deliberately in a shambolic state.
Our sister paper the Zimbabwe Independent yesterday carried a story titled: Fresh chaos rocks 30-day voter registration in which prospective voters are systematically frustrated so that they fail to register. Not only are there few registration centres, but workers from Mudede’s office are on a “go-slow” as one interviewee observed. People perceived to be MDC-T supporters have been deliberately removed from the voters’ roll.
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A classic example is that of Home Affairs co-minister Theresa Makone who found her name deleted from the roll. If a person of Makone’s calibre can be deleted, then what of a perceived ordinary supporter of any other party that is not Zanu PF? Mugabe’s party has been systematically registering its perceived supporters and we agree with analysts who say the ostentatious anti-sanctions petition was a ploy by Zanu PF to collect information about their supporters to use it to register them for voting. Why would a simple petition have information identical to that on the voters’ roll such as a person’s ward?
The gist of any election is to have all eligible voters exercise their right and if they are unable to do so, then there is no democratic election. That the voter registration exercise and the voters’ roll inspection go concurrently is unconstitutional. The only purpose it serves is to bar perceived supporters of other parties from registering. Now that parties will haggle about the proclaimed date of the election, the real issue — disenfranchisement of voters — will be relegated to the background where Zanu PF wants it to be.
What the other political parties should be fighting for is the proper registration of voters, an issue that they must strongly put across to Sadc this weekend otherwise they will unwittingly aid Zanu PF’s cause. We should fight as a nation to stop this daylight robbery of voters’ rights.