Yes, Nyikayaramba is right, Zanu PF will win

From the Editors Desk at the Zimbabwe Standard

Many would have been surprised by the grit displayed by Brigadier-General Douglas Nyikayaramba in stating that Zanu PF would win the harmonised elections his party wants held this year.

Asked by the Zimbabwe Independent what the military would do in case someone without liberation war credentials (obviously referring to Morgan Tsvangirai) won the elections, Nyikayaramba said the question was irrelevant because Zanu PF was assured of electoral victory in the next elections.

“I don’t see such a thing happening. It is (a) very irrelevant (question) based on factors on the ground. There is no such possibility. It’s a dream,” Nyikayaramba said. Recently there have been claims in the state-run media that Zanu PF would win the elections by 60% as opposed to MDC-T’s 40%. Sceptics have questioned how the former ruling party came up with these statistics.

But a look at the proposed amendments to the Electoral Act shows that a Zanu PF victory is inevitable. A report in the daily Herald on Friday said that cabinet had approved the proposed amendments after parties to the Global Political Agreement agreed on the raft of adjustments. The adjustments would now be gazetted before being brought to parliament for debate.

Tucked among the adjustments is one amendment which ensures that Zanu PF has already manipulated the elections and is heading for a landslide victory. This is the seemingly innocuous clause that stipulates that the next elections would use polling-station-based voters’ rolls as opposed to the ward-based rolls used in 2008.

It is surprising that, according to the Herald report, Tsvangirai with the other principals approved this amendment. We all know how Zanu PF is going to abuse this adjustment to win especially the rural vote.

Zanu PF has perpetuated the myth that it has got unwavering support in the rural areas when it fact it does not. However, political players in both the “opposition” and civil society seem to have swallowed this ruse and even promoted it. It is this trick that has enabled Zanu PF to continually claim victory in the rural areas when in fact they have used underhand means, such as denying voters secrecy when casting their ballots.

The fundamental issue about the electoral process in Zimbabwe, is not that there is electoral violence accompanying all elections but that the people, especially in the rural areas, have never been given the opportunity to express their free will.

There are minimum conditions that a ballot election should meet for it to be defined as such, which have never been met in Zimbabwe. One of these is secrecy; the other is security before, during and after voting. But due to lack of these two fundamental benchmarks in ballot elections, violence has become an effective electoral tool or technique used repeatedly to win elections.

According to analysts, if there is voter secrecy, enabling a voter to choose his or her electoral candidate without the fear that his choice will be known by another person and if there is an assurance that there will be no punishment or retribution for voting in a particular manner, violence would cease to be an effective electoral tool. A voter who has been subjected to violence will still be able to use the secrecy of the ballot to assert his freedom of choice.

When the secrecy of the ballot is lost and the security of the citizen who does not vote for those who hold power cannot be assured, then there will be no ballot elections. The voter becomes a human tool, a pawn in the vote accumulation scheme of the ones with power and not a free individual, freely exercising his or her right to determine the destiny of the country.

This is exactly the scenario that has been created for the next elections by making them polling-station-based rather than ward-based. In the last election people could choose which polling station in their ward to vote at but now every voter will be allocated a polling station at which to cast his vote. This immediately takes away the security that should go with ballot elections.

We know the tactics that will be used — they have all been used before — traditional leaders will ensure their subjects vote in a particular way and also ensure that everyone in the village votes. No one can abstain from voting because this would immediately be known. Village heads have in the past been known to confiscate their subjects’ identity documents only to return them at the polling station.

Polling-station-based voters’ rolls also expose voters to collective punishment. If individuals in a village decide to vote for a candidate different from the one those in power want, the whole community might be subjected to retribution through a witch-hunt.

On polling day villagers will be herded into polling stations and made to quietly follow orders. Observers may be lost to the fact that the villagers they are seeing in queues are not simply law-abiding citizens under their traditional leaders standing in a orderly manner to efficiently cast their ballots. They would in fact be citizens deprived of their pride and confidence; merely frightened and insecure persons going through the motion of putting an X exactly where they were told to put it.

We know that Zanu PF is already on the ground executing this strategy. Reports have come from throughout the country that military personnel referred to as “the boys on leave” have already been deployed into the rural areas to conscientise the people on how they are expected to vote and the consequences that go with voting otherwise.

By omission and commission civil society has failed to articulate the fundamental issues affecting elections in Zimbabwe. In the end, to many observers Zimbabwe has held elections by secret ballot which were marred by violence, but this is absolutely not so; Zimbabwe has never really held a secret ballot election, particularly in the rural areas where the majority of our people live.

Whereas in the urban areas the electoral process has been corrupted by placing hurdles in the way of voters casting their votes, in the rural areas voters have been deprived of the opportunity to cast their votes in secrecy.

Yes, Nyikayaramba is right, an MDC victory is just but a “dream” and Tsvangirai and his crew are like sheep being herded for slaughter, come next elections. Zimbabwe Standard