Last week, in this space, I said Tobaiwa Mudede’s office needed rehabilitation and argued that, in order for us to be guaranteed a free and fair election, Mudede himself should go, together with ZEC’s Lovemore Sekeramayi. I stand by that and I wish the RG and his senior staff would also be taken off the roll for all the sins they have committed by disenfranchising perhaps more than a million other voters who should have stood in the place of the dead ones all these years.
Dear reader, you have heard me well. Interesting as it may be, the public pronouncement that a million voters have been removed from the voters’ roll is as useless as it is startling. To start with, I was struck by its timing. Remember, it came on the heels of an equally dramatic revelation by the MDC that the RG’s office was busy inflating voter figures in some constituencies. In one ward in Harare, for instance, the roll had grown by more than 10,000 voters within two days!
It therefore looks as though the RG is being diversionary by giving a lame story about taking dead voters off the roll. He has succeeded, because, right now, I am focusing on that, instead of telling the world that we can’t trust Mudede since, like the generals, he would never countenance a non-Zanu (PF) electoral victory. Second, the figures that Mudede provides do not tally at all. He told us last week that about 700,000 dead people were removed from the voters’ roll between 1985 and 2010, and about 300,000 from then to date. In other words, it took about three years to remove close to half of the dead population that was struck off the list in the past 25 years.
Put differently, the RG has been discovering about 100,000 ghost voters every year from 2010 to now but only about 28,000 per annum prior to that. I am not convinced that his office has all of a sudden become so efficient, so there should be a good reason for that.
Clearly, the RG no longer needs these dead voters to ensure a Zanu (PF) victory. He has found a new way of stuffing the roll without having to embark on a graveyard mobile registration campaign. How would one otherwise justify the fact that a single ward in Harare is “registering” more than 5,000 voters a day, when it took years to achieve that figure before April this year? More like resurrecting the dead, isn’t it? Mudede is giving birth certificates and national IDs to ghosts and then mounting a rooftop to claim that Zimbabweans are busy making voters at night. Such a fable coming from Makombe Building!
We should therefore dismiss the RG’s recent claim of professionalism and efficiency around sanitizing the voters’ roll with the contempt it deserves. He might have finally removed Ian Douglas Smith and Rekayi Tangwena from the roll, but, in effect, put Douglas Smith Ian and Musorowegomo Ngana who died in 1980 in their place, with extras of course.
I wouldn’t be surprised at such adeptness. Fifty percent of the people who will read this article were not yet born when Mudede took office. His practical experience at Makombe is one credential that would always make him a master at the game of manipulating the voters’ roll. – For feedback, please write to majonitt@gmail.com
Post published in: Analysis