Political parties position on the common agenda- post election period - PDF document

Political parties’ position on the common agenda- post election period Paper presented by Jealousy Mawarire, National Patriotic Front (NPF) Spokesperson Holiday Inn, Bulawayo 7-8 March 2019 Introduction The presumption that political parties can find a common agenda is an interesting one in a society as politically polarised as ours. What is clear, even form the various CSO, expert and EMB presentations that were delivered yesterday, is that we seem to be looking at where we have gaps and problems in our electoral processes from very divergent and different perspectives. Where we seem to have consensus, however, is that for a very long time, the usual cry from opposition political parties and civil society has been the uncleanliness of our voter register, which uncleanliness led to accusations of electoral malfeasance and manipulation by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) and the ruling party, Zanu-PF. The 2018 elections, though not free and credible, by our standards, we will outline reasons herein, were held using a new electoral register, created, managed and kept by ZEC as prescribed by the law. Although there were initial doubts from some quarters that ZEC had no capacity to register people anew, given the time that was there between the commencement of the exercise and the proclamation of the election date, most Zimbabweans were pleasantly surprised by the EMB’s ability to register voters and come up with a new register, albeit with its own problems, but a new register all the same. In that light, I would like to commend ZEC for a job well done. I will, however, give my analysis of the few but very serious issues that we observed, as a party, pertaining to the voters roll on Election Day. But at this juncture, let me applaud the EMB for managing to give us a new register at a time many were sceptical of ZEC’s ability to come up with such, given the time and budgetary implications of such an exercise. My presentation will not dwell on election administration by ZEC, what CSOs and other electoral stakeholders should do, but largely touches on the electoral environment which I believe was inimical to the holding of a free and credible election regardless of the competency, or lack thereof, of the EMB. I believe a correct analysis of the environment can inform how we can tackle the electoral problems we are facing even today and by dint of protracted hard work, lead us to a common agenda for political and electoral reforms. Electoral environment The most contentious issue with the 2018 election was the environment within which the election was held, an environment that is persisting today which I believe might be hampering even our ability to correctly evaluate the elections freely, with assurances that we won’t be guests of the state after this session.

If we agree that the official election period was officially launched with the registration of former president Robert Mugabe at State House at a launch that introduced, not only the new electoral season, but the introduction of the biometric voter registration process (BVR) which gave us the new electoral register for which I have been heaping plaudits on ZEC, I think we will agree that the following period our country experienced a violent military takeover of government and the subversion of our constitution during the last electoral period. On November 15 2017, two months after the electoral period was officially set in motion by the symbolic registration of President Mugabe and his family at state house on 14 September 2017, the political environment in our country turned upside down with very grave implications to the holding of a free and credible election by July 30 2018. While many people would not want to identify that what happened in Zimbabwe was a military coup, the National Patriotic Front (NPF) the party I am representing at this forum, has always unreservedly described the events leading to the supposed resignation of the former president as a hostile military takeover of the state, government and Zanu-PF. The coup left us a de facto military state although the capture of key state institutions by the army is forcing some key state actors to insist that we are de jure , a constitutional state with a façade of democracy hyped by now tired dictums and slogans that talk to Zimbabwe being “open for business.” Notwithstanding the rhetoric of the authorities about Zimbabwe being open for business under an alleged new dispensation that is supposedly built on the rule of law and values of transparency and anti-corruption, the living reality on the ground that existed during the electoral period, and persisting now, is that the country has become a military state run by a Zanu-PF-Military Junta. The ruling party and the army have functionally and operationally become one and the same thing and this has brought about de facto military rule. Anyone who used to doubt this should take note of the reasons for the coup that are captured in the coup minutes that I will quote below and the confession by the Spokesperson to the President, who himself was the secretary to the army during the coup, when he recently wrote in the Herald of 06 February 2019. Mr George Ch aramba, in an article titled “ Using the past as a political blackmail in the present ”, told Herald readers on the 6 th of February 2019 that “ Carriers of Operation Restore Legacy [a euphemism for coup] are all Zanu- PF cadres to the bone” who were “largely motivated by the need to checkmate the alien G40 element in order to rescue the party and its government.” At the core of the coup, which fundamentally muddied the electoral environment, was the motivation by the army to “rescue Zanu -PF ” and avoid an “imminent electoral defeat.” The coup minutes, whose snippets form part of some annexure to this presentation, make it clear that the army, fronted by now Vice President Constatino Chiwenga and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sibusiso Moyo, staged the coup for political and electoral reasons. The minutes reveal that the army observed that “more worrisome were the div isive, manipulative and vindictive acts by the same cabal (G40) which threatened the electability of Zanu-PF in the impending 2018 harmonised elections thus raising the spectre of an electoral defeat which harkened to the 2008 electoral crisis and more bro adly, to a similar fate suffered by Zambia’s founding UNIP in the early 1990s”.