It is disappointing that Zimbabwe Election
Commission (ZEC) is still failing to take the seriously flawed July 2013
elections with the seriousness it deserves. In its latest report to parliament
ZEC admits to being stampeded into the election but only dwells on the minor
issues and is silent on the big issues.
"On the negative side, the new
constitution imposed new duties and obligations on the commission that the
commission had no time to pilot test or rehearse on before the actual
poll," reads the report. "The special vote for members of the
disciplined forces and staff of the commission who were to be away from wards
on voting day was one such new feature introduced by the Electoral Act that in
hindsight should have been rehearsed before it was implemented. The commission
would be the first to admit that the implementation of the special vote posed a
number of logistical challenges that must be addressed and avoided at all costs
in the future."
ZEC report is silent on the increase of polling
station from 2 000 to 9 000 just two days before the elections; the failure by
the Police to investigate the cases of bussed voters, we all saw on our TVs;
the failure to produce voters roll, even now a year after the elections; etc.
The voters roll is the smoking gun of this rigged vote!
The special vote and other issues the report
dwelt on at length were problems but these were feathers and not the meat of
the 2013 elections. If ZEC had addressed the big issues then the report would
not have failed to conclude that the whole electoral process was NOT free, fair and credible.
Zimbabwe is facing a serious economic meltdown
but for a year now has failed to address the economic problems behind it
because of the political crisis caused by the blatant rigging of the July 2013
elections. It was ZEC’s responsibility to ensure the elections were free, fair
and credible and, given that they were not, it was ZEC’s responsibility to say
so. ZEC has ducked its responsibility one both accounts and this half-hearted
admission that the July 2013 elections were not as they should have been is not
good enough.
ZEC should stop fiddling around and declare the
whole electoral process was not free, fair and credible and thus results of the
2013 elections are null and void!
ZEC, Zanu PF MPs, Zanu PF cabinet and President
Mugabe himself should all stop fiddling and admit the 2013 elections were
rigged, this regime is illegitimate, so that the nation can start the task of
holding free, fair and credible elections. Zimbabwe is not going to address the
economic meltdown without first resolving the issue legitimacy. This issue is
not going away, sooner or later Zanu PF will be force to bite the bullet and
deal with it!
Signed: Wilbert Mukori
Secretary General
Zimbabwe Social Democrats
15 comments:
UZ students are living like rats with as many as 48 students living in a four bedroomed house!
This is the result of 34 years of gross mismanagement and rampant corrupt; we have allowed Mugabe and Zanu PF ruin the nation and now we are paying the price!
@ William Doctor
Well, we did not need to take up any arms; all we had to do was implement the democratic reforms. MDC had five years to do so but failed to get even one reform implemented. And, worse still, the Zimbabwean electorate themselves failed to see the importance of the reforms and many of them still want the incompetent MDC leaders to remain in power. How stupid is that!
@ James Bond
If you are not angry that 300 000 or 80% of children are out of school then you do not understand what that means! If I burst my spleen and help end this criminal waste of humanity then it will be the best thing I have ever done!
The factional fighting in Zanu PF has spread to the rural areas with factions in Gokwe reportedly at each other’s throats.
If there is no room for a descending voice from within the party it is little wonder that the descending voice of those outside the party has never been heard these last 34 years! We must uproot this Zanu PF culture of intolerance once and once for all. All interparty fighting will be thoroughly investigated and all those guilty of lawlessness will be punished!
The right of every Zimbabwean to freedom of expression and political association must be guaranteed with no conditions!
@ James Bond
Being angry about the lives of so many children who are being denied a future shows I have a working brain as contrast to the millions out there for who that is water off the duck's back because their are brain dead. Zimbabwe's greatest problem is that me have more than our fair share of mentally challenged citi-zens, so challenged they will elect a village idiot not once but will do so again and again. First we elected a murderous tyrant Mugabe, then an incompetent idiot Tsvangirai.
If there was a free, fair and credible elections tomorrow millions of Zimbabweans will vote for Tsvangirai - that is how stupid they are!
Tsvangirai failed to get even one reform implemented because he is breathtakingly incompetent, failing to plan has nothing to do with it!
SENIOR MINISTER, SIMON KHAYA MOYO HAS CALLED A MEETING TO DISCUSS ZIMASSET IMPLEMENTATION WITH THE VIEW TO ARREST THE RECENT COMPANY CLOSURES IN BULAWAYO.
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME! SO SIMON KHAYA MOYO THINKS THE MEETING WILL COME UP WITH THE SOLUTIONS TO STOP THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN? HOW NAIVE!
THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN IS THE 34 YEARS OF GROSS MISMAN-AGEMENT AND RAMPANT CORRUPTION, PROBLEMS THE REGIME HAS DENIED ALL THESE YEARS ALLOWING THEM TO GROW OUT OF HAND. THESE PROBLEMS MUST BE AD-DRESSED AT A NATIONAL LEVEL, THERE IS NOTHING KHAYA MOYO AND A SELECTED FEW MINISTERS CAN DO.
SIMON KHAYA MOYO BOASTED THAT ZANU PF WILL RULE "UNTIL DONKEYS GROW HORNS"! UNLESS THE PARTY CAN RIG ECONOMIC RECOVERY, ZANU PF'S WILL BE LUCK TO STILL BE IN POWER FOR ANOTHER YEAR!
"Harare is now everything and everything is Harare." you say. Where did you get that nonsense from?
Only yesterday there was an article on this forum, of 500 individual queuing for a few temporary teaching jobs in Nzarayebani; many of those in queue had come from Harare. So why would these people leaving Harare if it has everything.
This is the kind of myopic analysis designed to play on tribal and regional difference which will only in-flame and divide the country. The truth is this Zanu PF dictatorship, which did not change its tyrannical character even after the merger with PF Zapu, has ridden rough shod over this nation denying all out peo-ple their basic human rights including the right to a meaningful vote and the right to life and destroyed the country’s economy.
The challenge before us today is how to end this tyrannical dictatorship, restore our people’s rights and human dignity and rebuild the ruined economy for the benefit of us all. Fanning tribal and regional hatred will only divert our attention and energy from the real task before us!
“The western countries thought that we don't have friends, they imposed sanctions on us protesting our land reform exercise…in China we have a real friend, above all the Zimbabwean masses are our friends," said Mugabe.
The West imposed the sanctions and moved on. Mugabe started his “look east” after the sanc-tions but the economic decline has continued and he has come back to the sanctions again and again totally unable to move on.
China has the second biggest economy in the world and throughout the years following the im-posed western sanctions on Zimbabwe China’s economy has continued to boom. As a trading partner therefore there really was no reason why Zimbabwe’s economy should have suffered in anyway because of the sanctions. The Zimbabwe economy has not just suffered it was collapse showing that there are serious underlying problems and the sanctions is a convenient scapegoat.
Mugabe’s failure to deal with the country’s serious underlying problems of mismanagement and corruption over the 34 years has allowed these cancers to grow and spread and today they are killing the national economy. Mugabe has made a large song and dance of the help offered him by the Chinese during his recent visit. The truth is the economic meltdown will continue untouched until the cancers killing the economy are removed!
"So they thought we did not have friends and placed sanctions just because we reclaimed our land from their kin. Let them know that we still have friends.
"Anyway our best friends are our people. Our best friends are our supporters who remain steadfast such that their machinations are to no avail," he said.
So where were your Chinese friends all these years? Why did they allow the Zimbabwe economy to go to the dogs to the point the government cannot pay civil servant wages let alone anything else? The regime will still struggle to pay civil servants come end of the month and the month after that because the Chinese refused to give the regime any budgetary support.
As for the people remaining steadfast in their support of the regime; no amount of cheap propa-ganda will change the fact on the ground that the regime rigged the elections denying our people, as it has done repeatedly in the past, a meaningful vote. There is going to be a thorough investigation into the 2013 elections to establish the true facts of the rigged elections and to punish those responsible for this treasonous crime!
“The West prefers a weak leader who, they hope, would allow the whites to come back,” he said, speaking in Shona.
“They think if they intimidate us we will be cowed and allow the whites to come back; that will never happen.
“Don’t they (whites) know where their ancestors came from? The British who are here should all go back to England.
“What is the problem? We now have aeroplanes which can take them back quicker than the ships used by their ancestors.”
Mugabe is using the anti-white rhetoric to divert attention away from the worsening economic meltdown. That has worked in the past but will not work this time; the economic meltdown is se-rious.
For years Mugabe has dodged the real underlying causes of Zimbabwe’s economic poor perfor-mance, mismanagement and corruption and focus on scapegoats the sanctions, the white minor-ity, etc. Fortunately for him he had an ignorant and gullible audience who readily believed him. Sadly this has allowed the mismanagement and corruption, the cancer, to grow and spread; to-day the national economic is in ICU and will not get out until these tumours are removed.
Mugabe knows that the economic meltdown is set to get even worse because these was nothing in the Chinese help that will help remove those tumours and get the national economy out of the ICU. Nothing!
Mugabe is upping his anti-white rhetoric to divert the people’s attention away from the economic meltdown and worsening economic hardships; it has worked for him before but it will not work this time because empty rhetoric will never fill an empty stomach.
@ Grace Kwinje
“Zimbabweans historically seem to have a rather naive tendency to form new political parties to deal with leadership deficits in existing ones,” you said.
“The inability to unite and collectively work towards the dismantling of Zanu-PF’s stranglehold has been and continues to be the undoing of Zimbabwe’s opposition,” is your solution?
The immediate and glaring weakness of your solution is if the leaders are incompetent, you have accepted that they are, how will uniting them make up for their incompetence or is it a matter of their continued blundering does not matter as long as they are doing so together. Then why do you want to dismantle Zanu PF, after all they have blundered together with PF Zapu since the two signed the unity accords back in 1987!
Tsvangirai, Ncube and the other MDC leaders failed to get even one democratic reform implemented throughout the five year life of the GNU not because the two MDC factions were not united but because they was no unit of purpose, they did not have the intellect to see what in their own individual and collective interest.
You are many other MDC members failed to see that without the reforms the July 2013 elections will not be free, fair and credible. We were tripping over each other to be the MDC candidate, to be the one to be cheated by Mugabe; how naïve was that! Worse still, you and many others in MDC have completely failed to comprehend that MDC leaders are breathtakingly incompetent and hence the reason you are still hankering for the party’s return to power and the gravy train regardless of the party’s pathetic political record! I sure hope the nation will have the good sense to never again elect incompetent leaders!
@ David Smith
If it was just his follow Zanu PF members standing in his way to making his wife president then we can all be sure the Mugabe's wish will prevail. What Mugabe has to deal with this time is the Zimbabwe economy; if he can rig economic recovery then, why not, he can install his wife on the throne.
Since the rigged July 2013 elections, rigging the economic recovery has been the real test he has had to face to retain his iron grip on power. Getting funding for his ZimAsset plan has been the key requirement in that recovery. So far he has failed to get even a dollar. His trip to China was his last throw of the dices in terms of getting funding. Sadly for Mugabe the Chinese has agreed to fund some specific projects when what the regime need desperately is budgetary support.
The economic meltdown that has forced many companies to close forcing even more workers of the unemployment heap will mean government revenue will fall further. The regime is struggling to pay something as basic as civil servant wages let alone anything else. This chaotic way of running a country cannot go on for long; Mugabe will not serve to the end of his term.
The only way to end the economic meltdown is for the country to implement all the democratic reforms and then hold free, fair and credible elections. Zanu PF will never ever win free, fair and credible elections. So it really is irrelevant who the Zanu PF candidate is going to be for the next elections, whoever it is they will not win the elections!
@Bluntboy
What Tendi is saying is nonsense, Mugabe got on well with Mrs Thatcher because the tyrant was getting a lot of money from the West at the time he would have fallen out with her if she was still in power when the free money stopped. Mugabe is nothing but the brat who did not want weaned off! Tony Blair had the misfortune to be the one to wean off the brat.
@Gerro
Dream on; your wishful thinking will not change the reality of the economic meltdown not even Mugabe's rhetoric can change that. The only thing that is going to end this rot is free, fair and credible elections followed by putting and end to all this criminal waste of resources because of corruption!
Here is a party that had five years in the GNU to implement democratic reforms and failed to get even one reform implemented. They agreed with Mugabe to deny the people in the diaspora a vote. Now that they have been kicked off the gravy train by Mugabe they are promising us honey.
“MDC provinces in the diaspora are working round the clock for the delivery of a honey flowing New Zimbabwe,” Kurauone Chihwayi tells us.
They really must think all Zimbabwe are stupid, sheep who would follow blindly incompetent leaders like Ncube from one blunder into the next without ever asking what happened. These idiots failed to deliver even one of the reforms agreed in the GPA when they had parliamentary majority and SADC’s backing, what hope is there that they will do so now that Mugabe and Zanu PF have the wind in their sail!?
Zimbabweans made a big mistake to have failed to see that MDC leaders are breathtakingly incompetent village idiots all these years but now that they have proven this beyond all doubt it will be sheer folly for the nation to entrust any of these MDC idiots with their political support and vote. I, for one, will do my damnedest to ensure that the nation is not conned by these idiots ever again!
Post a Comment