Chamisa lawyers finalising court challenge

MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa has assembled a team of legal experts to sift through the electoral data and mount a strong challenge against President Emmerson Mnangagwa's recent electoral victory.

MDC Alliance leader Nelson ChamisaAddressing the media yesterday, Chamisa's spokesperson Nkululeko Sibanda said the team was working flat out to finalise their papers to launch a court challenge to overturn the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec)'s declaration of Mnangagwa as President-elect.

Sibanda said Chamisa's legal team would advise the nation today when they will file the court challenge at the Electoral Court, but warned with limited prospects of success in the country's somewhat captured judiciary; the party had a cocktail of other measures to secure the people's "stolen" vote.

"We have a basket of approaches to ensure that the election does not remain stolen," Sibanda said.

"The legal route is one of the many ways. We did not put all our eggs in one basket. The evidence is far glaring to deny that this election was stolen.

Sibanda reiterated that Chamisa had won the election and was working with various structures in and outside the party to ensure that the people's vote was protected.

"We are not seeking as many would say; to overturn the elections. The fact of the matter is we have a simple task of overturning the declaration by Justice Priscilla Chigumba (the Zec chairperson)," he said.

Asked if the MDC Alliance was getting any external support given that some countries including South Africa had already endorsed Mnangagwa as winner, Sibanda said those countries that had congratulated the Zanu-PF leader as legitimate President-elect, were doing so the basis of the declared results.

The MDC Alliance has rejected the poll outcome that gave Mnangagwa a 50,8% lead on Chamisa who pulled 44,4% of the vote.

Chamisa has vowed to fight the poll outcome, demanding that Zec release constituency-based tallies.

Zec responded by publishing results by constituencies, but Sibanda yesterday rubbished the Zec report, saying the figures were inconsistent and do not tally with the V11 forms in their possession.

He said it was evident in the Zec tallies that Mnangagwa's votes where inflated in some areas while Chamisa's votes were deflated. He said the data released by Zec had glaring inaccuracies.

He insisted the MDC Alliance agents were left out in the verification of the presidential votes and also shot down claims that his party refused to hand in their V11 forms for verification.

"She [Chigumba] is the custodian of the V11 forms. She is the one who is supposed to produce them, she gives us a copy and keeps originals so there is no way that she could need them from us. In fact, the opposition were denied 21% of those because she refused to hand them over. So there is no way we can give her.

"The fact is, she has the forms, she has to take information from them and what we do is to provide an agent who then agrees if the information on our V11 forms tally. We don't have to give her our V11 forms. It is strange."

Sibanda said the party had polling agents at most stations except those polling stations moved by Zec, but said whether or not they did not manage to get sufficient data, the trajectory with 79% of polling stations they have data from, they were still winning even if Mnangagwa won in all the 21% polling stations they did not manage to get V11 forms.