A confidential letter to Judge Chigumba & ZEC

I greet you cordially.

I am writing this letter to let you know that your conduct of the 2018 elections has embarrassed both the living and the living-timeless. I am among the Zimbabweans shamed by ZEC's shambolic elections of 2018 and you should be informed of the following three issues.

First, why do you want to wait for 4 or 5 days to announce the presidential election? You should know that an election result is like a human corpse, the reason why corpses are buried immediately is to avoid disturbances. The law gives a grace period of five days in order to allow your team not to work under pressure. The rule of thumb is that, any result received should be announced and buried immediately. I pray to God that you will not miss the timeline (allowed by the Zimbabwean constitution) and the world is watching us.

Second, I want you to take the responsibility of the deaths and injuries caused by the soldiers today (01/08/2018) during a peaceful protest in the city of Harare. I once warned you that the way you are conducting elections was dangerous for our country, you should therefore take responsibility of this disturbance in Harare.  I am now requesting you to announce the results immediately in order to restore peace and normalize tension among the disgruntled citizens.   

I was very surprised to come across soldiers shooting (on air and innocent civilians), was that appropriate according to the constitution of Zimbabwe? I was born 41 years ago and have never seen R.G. Mugabe unleashing soldiers to the innocent civilians during my life time  except the 'moment of madness'. Are we in a military state? I am also requesting you to condemn the brutal conduct of soldiers (of injuring and killing alleged three innocent civilians who were not involved with protests).

Finally, are you using genuine Biometric Voter Registration system/technology (BVR)? The key purpose of BVR system apart from registration is to transmit results from polling stations through to command center. A lot of our money was spent to procure that system but it seems that it was procured to enhance cheating of a certain political party. It was observed that manual transmission of results was subject to cheating and it seems the transmission of results has not changed. Such transmission (manual) exposed the credibility of ZEC's results. Why did you decide to opt for a manual transmission of results? Why did you not opt to use BRV transmission system to avoid manipulation of results?  Was this planned?

Conclusion
I am confident that the way your team handled BVR system was to expose the results to manipulation by one of the political parties in Zimbabwe. In the best interest of peace in Zimbabwe, may you please release the presidential results now. You should also accept responsibility of the deaths caused by your partial and subjective way of handling 2018 election results transmission. You have demonstrated that the task is too huge for your abilities and you should resign soon after this election.  

Don Chigumba is a mixed methods research specialist, can be found on twitter @Donchigumba