Worse is that legal nitpickers will try to rebut any challenge to the legitimacy of the referendum because on the day it was held, ZEC did apparently have a properly appointed chairperson. (I am not up to date on whether all the commissions that should have been consulted on this appointment were involved, so there may be doubt here.)
That shows a nifty bit of timing by someone. ZEC itself looks a bit more clumsy in its mistiming of important events.
It’s bad enough that the referendum was held in such a rush that we, the electorate, could not possibly have read the full final version of the COPAC draft and made the necessary clause-by-clause comparison with the latest panel-beaten version of what was once the Lancaster House constitution and Zanu (PF)’s Kariba draft. I do know one man who has been comparing COPAC and Lancaster, but that must have taken a large part of his time for the past two weeks. Most of us don’t have the free time or the documents to do that kind of job, so how could we be well enough informed to vote for or against the latest panel-beaten version of COPAC?
But after such indecent haste, ZEC says we must wait five days for the final results. I am writing this on day one of those five days and it will be day five by the time you read this, so I’ll be pleased if that story proves untrue, but I am dissatisfied, and we should all be dissatisfied, that we have seen no results at all by 4.30pm Sunday. In any properly organised democracy, as in Kenya recently, they can do better than that.
Unlike after the 2008 election, we don’t even have Al Jazeera’s correspondent standing outside ZEC’s offices and reporting every two hours that nothing is happening. Many people suspect nothing visible would happen until they have cooked up “results” that suit their bosses. After all, if Mrs. Kazembe was able to declare that ZEC was “ready for an election any time the President wants”, ZEC should be able to produce any result he wants if they just take long enough – as we saw in 2008.
I’m not clear on who is supposed to be counting the ballots. After an election, they are supposed to be counted at the polling stations and the results to be posted there in addition to sending them to Harare for the totals to be calculated, which means we can all see what is happening. Does this apply for a referendum? We would trust the process more if every stage was open to inspection – on the spot, not after total results have been announced.
But if I’m talking about careful timing, I must mention the way ZEC refused to accredit observers from ZimRights and grudgingly admitted they had been wrong when a court order overruled them – on Friday March 15. That didn’t give ZimRights much chance of sending observers to Mutiusinazita or Siyanzundu, even if the court had ordered a presidential helicopter should be made available. By the way, did the Zimbabwe Peace Project get the same reprieve?
But don’t lose heart. 1972, 1979 and 2000 showed that we are at our best when the one thing we know is what we don’t want. If very few of us voted, we need to show we don’t want to be pushed into accepting a bad constitution – even if all 3 million dead voters “voted” for it.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis