By Tichaona Sibanda
The MDC-T is contemplating taking legal action against Nikuv International Projects, an Israeli based company with offices in Harare, that was allegedly contracted by ZANU PF to manipulate the voters roll.
SW Radio Africa has been informed that the court challenge would be based on information that Nikuv is manipulating the voters roll in order to sway the vote in favour of President Robert Mugabe.
The matter came to head on Thursday when MDC activists and supporters pressured party leader Morgan Tsvangirai to get to the bottom of the voter’s roll problem, following information that the registrar-general’s office has deleted names of thousands of people eligible to vote in the upcoming elections.
Tsvangirai held meetings with party structures in Bulawayo on Thursday where the issue of Nikuv was discussed at length, leading to recommendations that the company should be asked to reveal exactly the type our work it is doing for the Ministry of Home Affairs.
‘What has happened before is that on inspecting the voters roll, you may find your name there but on the day of voting, your name is not there. This is how they manipulate the roll,’ Tsvangirai said during one of the meetings.
Last month Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede, whose department falls under the Home Affairs ministry, said close to a million dead voters had been deleted from the voters roll. He said the total voter population as at May 1st 2013, was 5, 677,881.
‘Deceased voters from 1985 to 2010 stand at 692,422 while deceased voters from 2010 to date are at 277,198 which gives us a total of 969,620 deceased voters,’ said Mudede, amid claims thousands of names from MDC strongholds may have been clandestinely deleted with help from Nikuv during this process.
It has been alleged that some of the staff members at Nikuv are former Mossad agents, who are experts in vote rigging and have been active in Zimbabwe for the past six years. In the run-up to the disputed 2008 elections, the MDC-T accused the company of assisting ZANU PF to manipulate the roll when it took the Electoral Commission five weeks to release the results of the election.
According to calculations by the MDC-T, Tsvangirai won the first round poll by more than 50% of the votes, but, when results were eventually published, he was credited with 47.9% against Mugabe’s 43.2%, forcing a run-off.
A campaign of violent intimidation led Tsvangirai to withdraw from the second round, leaving Mugabe in power. At the time the Israeli embassy in Pretoria took the unusual step of issuing a statement, denying that Mossad was involved in any way in the elections.
Academic Ibbo Mandaza, has in the past told journalists that Nikuv have manipulated the roll, on Mugabe’s instructions.
Tendai Biti, the secretary-general of the MDC-T, said recently: ‘Mugabe and his cronies intend to steal this election through the use of sophisticated software provided by the Israeli company with Mossad connections.”
Earlier this year MP Eddie Cross, the MDC-T director for policy, said Nikuv was working on the roll at Defence House, the headquarters of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces.
Cross said the company works under the direction of Daniel Tonde Nhepera, the deputy head of the Zimbabwe’s dreaded internal security arm, the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO).
This is not the first time that Nikuv has been accused of helping the ruling party in an African country rig elections. In 1996 Zambia’s opposition party, the United National Independence Party, similarly accused the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy of trying to rig the elections with Nikuv’s help.
