“A day before the referendum I got to talk to a young man in his mid-twenties in Mwenezi, Masvingo. He told me that he and the wider community had never seen the draft constitution let alone read it and that they had been ordered to vote ‘Yes’ by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. Apart from ZEC they had seen no one else. He said he would not be voting for something he was not sure of. These sentiments were echoed by almost everyone I spoke to,” he said. He visited a number of polling stations on the day of the referendum. Short queues formed in the mid-morning and by the afternoon hardly any were left. He also asked several households how many people had voted and the results indicated widespread apathy.
ZEC’s report of an unprecedented high voter turnout is disputed by both civil society and the MDC-T. Tapa said people felt betrayed by formerly progressive voices, including MDC-T, who had acquiesced in human rights abuses and lack of reform. They had lost hope and now didn’t talk about politics at all, just bread and butter issues. The Vigil is alarmed by the alacrity with which the outside world has welcomed the bogus referendum figures. The US was quick to congratulate Zimbabwe for holding a ‘successful’ referendum – in the face of a damning report on ‘systematic’ political oppression in Zimbabwe by the Robert Kennedy Centre.