Five years ago, Zimbabwe held its national elections on 30th July 2018 and the electoral process was generally peaceful until the 1st of August 2018.
A group of demonstrators took to the streets of Harare demanding the immediate release of the presidential election results. The demonstrators had set the Simon Muzenda Zanu PF offices alight, and destroyed vehicles that were in the vicinity.
A group of demonstrators took to the streets of Harare demanding the immediate release of the presidential election results. The demonstrators had set the Simon Muzenda Zanu PF offices alight, and destroyed vehicles that were in the vicinity.
Under pressure from the international community, on 12 September 2018, the President Emmerson Mnangagwa, appointed a Commission of Inquiry chaired by former South African president, Kgalema Motlanthe.
The Motlanthe Commission report made several recommendations which include:
The laws relating to hate speech, abuse of cyberspace and incitement to violence should be reviewed.
Five years on nothing has been done to implement and change the current laws to prevent the violence that occurred in 2018.
- Under section 42 of the Criminal Law Code it is a crime to make an insulting or grossly provocative statement that causes offence to people of a particular race, tribe, colour or religion.
- Under section 177 of the Criminal Law Code a person who makes a false statement or “does any act or thing whatsoever” realising there is a risk or possibility of engendering hostility towards police officers or exposing them to contempt, ridicule or disesteem” is guilty of a crime.
- Incitement to violence is a crime under section 187 of the Criminal Law Code, as read with sections 36 and 89 of the Code.
Abuse of cyberspace is dealt with by the Data Protection Bill which was amended to accommodate the law:- transmitting data messages that incite violence or damage to property and sending threatening data messages.
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Electoral reforms
Recommendation: ICT (information and communications technology) facilities should be developed for the speedy transmission of election results to the Command Centre.
There was a need to amend the Electoral Act to shorten the time for presidential election results to be announced.
No amendments have been made to the Electoral Act since the 2018 general election. The five-day time limit for declaring the result of a presidential election, laid down in section 110(3)(h) of the Act, still stands and is the law.
Zimbabwe's government failure to implement recommendations of Motlanthe commission has placed Zimbabwe in a precarious position ahead of the 2023 general elections.
However, ZEC can use the adoption of technology by both the government and the nationals to avoid the mistakes of the past.
According to GSMA Intelligence's numbers indicate that mobile connections in Zimbabwe were equivalent to 89.7 percent of the total population in January 2022.
- The number of mobile connections in Zimbabwe increased by 445 thousand (+3.4 percent) between 2021 and 2022. Digital infrastructure is one of Zimbabwe's relative strengths, but regulatory roadblocks hamper its implementation. Zimbabwe’s national connectivity infrastructure is relatively well-developed with fiber connecting major cities, urban areas and the rural communities.
With this kind of statistical data Zimbabwe should have the ICT technology to publish its local, national and presidential elections results quicker than the five day time limit prescribed by the current laws.
Above that the widespread use of social media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, etc should be effectively used by ZEC to efficiently publish election results as the results filter through during the counting process.
Let us not repeat the violence of August 2018 by delaying the publishing of election results and use existing technologies to inform and alert the general public on all election developments during the election processes.
Mutisi is the CEO of Hansole Investments(Pvt) Ltd. He is the current chairperson of Zimbabwe Information & Communication Technology, a division of Zimbabwe Institution of Engineers.
