Special vote removed all doubts about ZEC

I have listened to Rita Makarau and Joyce Kazembe blab on ad nauseum about how prepared their organisation is for the election in two weeks’ time. They have been falling over each other to lecture us on how much they are raring to go. But it is all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The shoddy manner in which the special vote was handled is embarrassing and infuriating. Ballots took a long time to reach polling centres, with some stations commencing the special vote only in the evening of the first day, while others completely failed to do so. Voting slips were misplaced, there was hardly any communication from ZEC and confusion on how to handle the police constabulary vote reigned supreme.

Polling officers took ages to sort out the envelopes containing the ballots and they hardly bothered to explain to agents and voters what was happening, resulting in acute frustration. I would never give ZEC the Communicator of the Year award, but there are basic things we expected the commission to know and practice, which it dismally failed to do.

I was particularly riled by the fact that ZEC tried, very lamely, to pass the buck to political parties that had made court challenges regarding which candidates must contest. Kazembe insulted my intellect by claiming that ZEC had failed to sort out the ballots in time because of the court challenges.

Only a few cases were brought before the courts, and these should surely not have had such a significant bearing on ballot handling. The delay in dispatching the polling slips was a nationwide malaise. Mechanisms should have been put in place to deal with the emergency, and it is obvious that some people, if not all of them, were sleeping on duty, or busy spending the allowances they must be getting for dealing with the special vote.

Kazembe, certainly, chose to be politically correct by shifting the blame to the two MDC parties, and thus away from Zanu (PF) to which she seems beholden. She was too careful not to mention the high likelihood of there being no money or adequate human resources to do adequate preparations, in case she stepped on some powerful people’s toes. Zanu (PF) has insisted on a hurried election for myriad reasons that do not exclude the possibility of a rigging system already in place and worries over President Robert Mugabe’s health. The party has also claimed that the money for the election is there, despite palpable evidence to the contrary on the ground.

ZEC demonstrated a fatal incapacity to handle the special vote. If it is ill-prepared for an election involving less than 80,000 voters, what is likely to happen when it is faced with more than 6 million? Worse still, voting for that paltry figure was spread over two days—nobody knows why—yet the general election will be held in only one day.

The confusion and mayhem set to obtain on July 31 give me very bumpy goose pimples. As has always been my worry, thousands of people will find themselves missing from the voters’ roll, polling stations will open late, and some will not open at all. There will be little stationery to cater for the poll, polling agents will be barred from monitoring the process and ballots will be lost.

That untidiness, of course, is the ideal ingredient for rigging, which tends to bloom where confusion rules. It will give one party—you know which—the chance to stuff empty boxes with ballots and give the dead enough time to emerge from their graves to go and vote, maybe two or three times over each, seeing as it is ghosts have no fingers to dip in indelible ink.

The special vote scandal has doused any chances of legitimacy around our polls, and I hope observers who are already on the ground will note that, otherwise history will judge not only ZEC, but them as well. . – For feedback, please write to majonitt@gmail.com