Komichi says elections won’t change anything, ‘institutions are captured’

MDC Alliance chairperson Morgen Komichi has claimed that Zimbabweans do not have the capacity of changing leadership through elections because the ruling Zanu-PF party has captured all institutions of power.

Komichi controversially rejected the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s (ZEC) presidential results in 2018, declaring President Emmerson Mnangagwa the winner, citing a failure to follow the results verification process prescribed by the constitution.

In an exclusive interview with Nehanda Radio, Komichi said state institutions including the ZEC, security forces and the judiciary were partisan players in cahoots with Zanu PF to coerce the election results to reflect their desired outcome.

“The opposition people still believe that by going to an election you can change things in countries that went to for the war of Liberation, it is not possible, because it has never happened in all these countries and you can’t say the people that are in Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya are fools, no there is a complexity of structures which is built soon after the war to protect the entitlement that we went for the war of Liberation.

“As one analyst said, while the president of this country is the leader of Zanu PF, don’t forget that he is also the president of the state of which under the state there is the military, CIO, police and the prison services are also there.

“All these state organs have a duty to protect their leader, so when we contest elections in the case of Zimbabwe you are not against Zanu-PF per say but also other state institutions that have a duty to protect their president.

“State institutions are not independent so you think right now Priscilla Chigumba has got the right to announce any other winner besides Zanu PF, if you think like that then you must be dreaming.

“Do you think that the Supreme Court or ConCourt has a right to say ED (Mnangagwa) has lost elections. These are facts that people do not want to discuss and therefore as a result we are failing to come up with a solution to resolve our issues,” said Komichi.

Zimbabwean elections have been marred by violence, allegations of vote rigging, and vote buying since the emergence of a vibrant opposition in the early 2000s.

The opposition has always rejected election outcomes that favored the ruling party, Zanu PF, citing violence, vote rigging and other electoral malpractices as the major factors.

ZEC, which is in charge of overseeing the election process, is currently dominated by partisan state intelligence and former military officials, raising concerns about its independence and credibility in the upcoming elections.

The Zanu-PF government’s lack of political will to implement electoral reforms recommended by both international and local observers has fuelled speculation that Zimbabwe will face another contested election that begets a legitimacy crisis.

Komichi stated that in a country like Zimbabwe, where the ruling party is a revolutionary party that brought independence, votes alone were insufficient to win a presidential election but also the blessing of the army.

“If you do not have the blessing of the military you won’t go to the state house, vote alone is not enough, because there is entitlement which the war liberations have.

“The war Liberation parties went to the armed struggle and won the country through the barrel of the gun so they always want to protect the ‘independence’ and they don’t trust anyone else who never went to war to be entrusted in the leadership of that country so they feel they have been betrayed.

“So they will always defend that party that went to the Liberation war, they got confidence in it, they don’t have confidence in any other parties,” concluded Komichi.