Opinion / Columnist
Enough of Zanu-PF Rigging
13 Jul 2018 at 13:38hrs | Views
Can a leopard ever become a sheep just because it is wearing a sheep's skin? Obviously no. The originally evil ZanuPF is still as it was before November 2017! If not worse. This is the predicament in which Zimbabweans find themselves with this ZanuPf-Zec election rigging machine. Zec's Major Utoile Silaigwana says it is constitutional that the police vote as they are doing. He says that, those who applied for this exercise vote in secret. These police officers voted publicly under orders to vote for ZanuPF candidates. The police officers being a military organisation take orders as they are. Of course this is not new. This is what ZanuPF has been doing. Their rigging machinery has not changed just as they have not changed from anything that Robert Mugabe did since 1980.The difference is that now they are trying to be a bit stealthy since they have captured some overt support of the British journalists.
The constitution does not say commanders must order their juniors to vote for ZanuPF candidates or any other candidate for that matter. Nor does it say that this type of voting is to be conducted publicly with long queues of police officers casting their vote under their commanders' supervision. This level of insults to Zimbabwean people's intelligence has reached the most preposterous degree of naivety. It is clear to all and sundry that there is blatant election rigging as it has been the case since 1980.
These so called postal votes are put in ballot boxes by ZanuPF members who are by themselves and are then sent for counting. One official said there are only 4000 people who applied while another official put the figure at 7000. Who is there to see that these ZanuPF members do not put thousands more from where ever to increase the numbers of their vote count? No matter what the number is, these do make a difference and the process is to be handled transparently if these elections can be deemed free, fair and credible.
The people of Zimbabwe must reject this ZanuPF manipulation of the constitution. This is time to break the chains of ZanuPF repression, lies and chicanery. Their leader has been globetrotting and falsely claiming that he will make sure that election are free, fair and credible. These lies must be exposed. Zimbabweans need nothing short of genuinely free, fair and credible elections this year. This is the only way to guarantee democracy, freedom and respect of human rights. Postal votes from the Civil servants that have been carried out clearly violated the constitution. They must be rejected.
No doubt the rhetoric of free and fair election is just a political gimmick to appear different from Mugabe, yet the reality is that the orchestrators of the "new dispensation" and Mugabe are brothers under the skin. A leopard will always be a leopard no matter how well one talks about it and so is ZanuPF.
The constitution does not say commanders must order their juniors to vote for ZanuPF candidates or any other candidate for that matter. Nor does it say that this type of voting is to be conducted publicly with long queues of police officers casting their vote under their commanders' supervision. This level of insults to Zimbabwean people's intelligence has reached the most preposterous degree of naivety. It is clear to all and sundry that there is blatant election rigging as it has been the case since 1980.
The people of Zimbabwe must reject this ZanuPF manipulation of the constitution. This is time to break the chains of ZanuPF repression, lies and chicanery. Their leader has been globetrotting and falsely claiming that he will make sure that election are free, fair and credible. These lies must be exposed. Zimbabweans need nothing short of genuinely free, fair and credible elections this year. This is the only way to guarantee democracy, freedom and respect of human rights. Postal votes from the Civil servants that have been carried out clearly violated the constitution. They must be rejected.
No doubt the rhetoric of free and fair election is just a political gimmick to appear different from Mugabe, yet the reality is that the orchestrators of the "new dispensation" and Mugabe are brothers under the skin. A leopard will always be a leopard no matter how well one talks about it and so is ZanuPF.
Source - Mkhululi Zulu
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