Opinion / Columnist
Disaster for Chamisa as scheme revealed
22 Jul 2018 at 09:22hrs | Views
The plan was simple. Five steps to victory.
Step one: Cry foul over the voters roll and have your own stooges attack its credibility.
Step two: Threaten and intimidate the ZEC chairperson into bending to your will
Step Three: Announce you will prevent the elections from happening, causing an international crisis which will force the global players to get involved.
Step Four: Charm the observers into accepting your viewpoint wholeheartedly
Step Five: Announce you have won the election, irrespective of the true outcome, and have the international community recognise your 'victory'.
Unfortunately for Chamisa and his supporters, it has not gone to plan.
His complaints about the electoral roll were supposed to be backed up by civil society organisations. So when the MDC-funded 'Team Pachedu' audit, conducted by MDC backers in the US, claimed there were serious flaws in the roll, Chamisa appeared to be on to a winner.
But calamity struck. A few days later, the independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) released their own audit. Unsurprisingly, an impartial body had a somewhat different reading. They dismissed Pachedu's alarmist and unfounded claims, noting that while no voter roll is perfect, the 2018 roll is significantly better, more complete and more inclusive than the 2013 one. Critically, ZESN did not identify anomalies that affected a large percentage of registrants or were they concentrated among registrants of a particular area, gender or age.
Bottom line. The roll is not perfect, but good. Certainly not worth disrupting elections over.
The next part of the plan was no more successful. Chamisa's attempts to bully and intimidate the ZEC Chair through forcing himself into her office, mass protests and having his G40 friends blackmail her with unfounded sexist allegations proved ineffective.
Chigumba stood tall and was unmoved by the threats. What's more, rather than turn people against her, Zimbabwean society was so appalled by Chamisa's underhand tactics that they rallied to her side. Today, Chigumba is a much more popular figure than she was two weeks ago.
But the real disaster was yet to come.
Having pleaded with the international community to intervene in this 'crisis', Chamisa would have been happy to see The Elders arrive, led by Kofi Annan. After all, The Elders had previously been extremely critical of the Mugabe regime. He was banking on their support.
So he must have been mortified by their announcement at the conclusion of their meeting.
Annan was largely positive about the overall situation, describing the pre-election environment as free with all parties being able to exercise their rights to campaign freely. This positive outlook has also been expressed by the AU and SADC observers, with the international community coming to together to voice their cautious approval of the campaign so far.
In contrast, Annan did not mince his words with regard to Chamisa and the opposition.
"What is important is that we all play by the rules and we make reasonable demands," he said. "If we make demands which are unreasonable and which cannot be fulfilled, we are complicating the process. So, I would urge everyone to be reasonable and operate within the rules… But we should be careful of what we say and what we demand, because the main thing is not to incite.If you incite the population, you never know what happens and this is the last thing that the nation and the people of Zimbabwe need. No incitement!"
Annan and his colleague in The Elders, former Irish President Mary Robinson, went on to describe their 'shock' at the sexist abuse and threats directed at prominent women connected to the election, notably Justice Priscilla Chigumba.
The question is now, what does Chamisa do next. Aware of the likelihood of defeat in a fair election, the plan has been based around creating chaos, panic and crisis, and then mobilising the international community to his side. This plan has failed badly.
His choice now is to stand in the election (aware he will probably lose), or to go all out to prevent the election from happening.
For Zimbabwe's sake, let's hope he chooses the former.
Step one: Cry foul over the voters roll and have your own stooges attack its credibility.
Step two: Threaten and intimidate the ZEC chairperson into bending to your will
Step Three: Announce you will prevent the elections from happening, causing an international crisis which will force the global players to get involved.
Step Four: Charm the observers into accepting your viewpoint wholeheartedly
Step Five: Announce you have won the election, irrespective of the true outcome, and have the international community recognise your 'victory'.
Unfortunately for Chamisa and his supporters, it has not gone to plan.
His complaints about the electoral roll were supposed to be backed up by civil society organisations. So when the MDC-funded 'Team Pachedu' audit, conducted by MDC backers in the US, claimed there were serious flaws in the roll, Chamisa appeared to be on to a winner.
But calamity struck. A few days later, the independent Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) released their own audit. Unsurprisingly, an impartial body had a somewhat different reading. They dismissed Pachedu's alarmist and unfounded claims, noting that while no voter roll is perfect, the 2018 roll is significantly better, more complete and more inclusive than the 2013 one. Critically, ZESN did not identify anomalies that affected a large percentage of registrants or were they concentrated among registrants of a particular area, gender or age.
Bottom line. The roll is not perfect, but good. Certainly not worth disrupting elections over.
The next part of the plan was no more successful. Chamisa's attempts to bully and intimidate the ZEC Chair through forcing himself into her office, mass protests and having his G40 friends blackmail her with unfounded sexist allegations proved ineffective.
But the real disaster was yet to come.
Having pleaded with the international community to intervene in this 'crisis', Chamisa would have been happy to see The Elders arrive, led by Kofi Annan. After all, The Elders had previously been extremely critical of the Mugabe regime. He was banking on their support.
So he must have been mortified by their announcement at the conclusion of their meeting.
Annan was largely positive about the overall situation, describing the pre-election environment as free with all parties being able to exercise their rights to campaign freely. This positive outlook has also been expressed by the AU and SADC observers, with the international community coming to together to voice their cautious approval of the campaign so far.
In contrast, Annan did not mince his words with regard to Chamisa and the opposition.
"What is important is that we all play by the rules and we make reasonable demands," he said. "If we make demands which are unreasonable and which cannot be fulfilled, we are complicating the process. So, I would urge everyone to be reasonable and operate within the rules… But we should be careful of what we say and what we demand, because the main thing is not to incite.If you incite the population, you never know what happens and this is the last thing that the nation and the people of Zimbabwe need. No incitement!"
Annan and his colleague in The Elders, former Irish President Mary Robinson, went on to describe their 'shock' at the sexist abuse and threats directed at prominent women connected to the election, notably Justice Priscilla Chigumba.
The question is now, what does Chamisa do next. Aware of the likelihood of defeat in a fair election, the plan has been based around creating chaos, panic and crisis, and then mobilising the international community to his side. This plan has failed badly.
His choice now is to stand in the election (aware he will probably lose), or to go all out to prevent the election from happening.
For Zimbabwe's sake, let's hope he chooses the former.
Source - Innocent Dube
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