Proposed New General Elections: Any Hope for the Future?

By Mbiriyashe Chiratidzo Mungaraza

The post 2008 general election trauma is still haunting the entire majority of Zimbabweans. It was an election marred and characterised by unforeseen violence caused by Zanu PF with their intention to cling on to power until Kingdom come. Many people were beaten, tortured, maimed, and killed while others were left homeless with no hope for the future.

What is particularly worrying is Zanu PF’s belief that they can still win the forthcoming elections. It is still not clear whether these elections will be held any time soon. The truth is that Zanu PF will never relinquish power even if they are defeated. Their (Zanu PF) cronies who have ravaged the country’s economy and massacred innocent civilians will never allow a free and fair election. The truth is that Mugabe’s pensioners are aware that people are fed up with their tactics.

Vote rigging

The entire world is now aware that Zanu PF has been winning elections through rigging and violence. Mugabe and his allies would rather cling on the dysfunctional unity government rather than face humiliation. Despite the malfunctioning of the unity government, Mugabe is still adamant that he can still win back the hearts of electorate although he is reluctant to share power accordingly. He is still dictating the the pace and worse through the indiscriminate persecuting of his opponents.

If MDC really joined this Unity Government to save the country and its suffering people, then now is the right time to press hard for fresh, free and fair internationally supervised elections. People are geared up to defeat Zanu PF. There is no doubt Zanu PF is now very unpopular.

Ideally, MDC should be in the driving seat since they have the majority of seats in parliament but Mugabe and his thugs are still using their unscrupulous dictatorial tactics to maintain a stranglehold on the reigns of power. The way Mugabe is handling this unity government leaves a lot to be desired. There is no need for Tsvangirai to keep on compromising. It is now high time he should press for new elections. Zimbabweans have suffered enough and people’s rights continue to be abused with impunity, living in perpetual fear of their brutal leaders.

Economy

The economic recovery of the country is being jeopardised by the tensions within this so called unity government. The three parties involved are pulling in different directions threatening the already fragile coalition government with collapse. To worsen matters, Mugabe’s policy to grab 51 percent shareholding from any foreign investment makes Zimbabwe not only an unattractive destination for foreign investment, but also a no go area for those who respect the rule of law and property rights.

The longer Tsvangirai stays in this unity goverment, the harder it will be for him turn things around for the better. Notwithstanding the MDC’s involvement, Mugabe’s blood thirst rag tag army of party thugs and war veterans continue harass and brutalise defenceless civilians. It is high time that the MDC make a bold stand and force Mugabe to account by ensuring that a new constitution that guarantees free and fair elections is in place sooner rather than later.

International Observers

Previous elections have not been free and fair at all. They were mared by violence and the election observers were very incompetent. The Electoral Commision whose mandate is to supervise the conduct of the elections is largely pro-Zanu PF. So if ever a free and fair election is going to take place then, International monitors and observers are supposed to be involved at the earliest possible time. The current electoral system favours Zanu PF and it gives its supporters a free reign to cause mayhem with impunity.

As it stands, Mugabe will never support free and fair elections to take place because that will have disastrous consequences for his Party. He knows that once that is allowed to happen, this will mark the beginning of the end of his reign paving the way for a refreshingly better political
dispensation with safeguards for human rights and the much needed rule of law. The big question is; Can there be free and fair elections in Zimbabwe with the geriatric leader at the helm? Only time will tell.

Mbiriyashe Chiratidzo Mungaraza is a Zimbabwean based in Leicester

HAT News is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are therefore those of the author.

Film of vote rigging is judged best news programme

The clandestine footage that Shepherd Yuda, a 36-year-old Zimbabwe prison officer, shot inside jail was dynamite. It gave incontrovertible proof of how Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party was rigging the ballots in last year’s national elections. Once he knew the film was about to be shown in Britain and around the world, he slipped out of the country with his family.

This week, The Stolen Ballots, the documentary he helped to make at great personal risk for GuardianFilms, won best news programme at the Broadcast Awards, run by the weekly magazine for TV and radio. Now he is in Britain, taking a university course in forensic science that he hopes will one day help him to win justice for friends and relatives who have been murdered in Zimbabwe, as a scenes of crime officer.

Yuda escaped from Zimbabwe with his family last summer by pretending they were all going for a holiday in another African country, just as the film was broadcast in Britain.

Yuda stayed for three weeks in southern Africa while his application for asylum was fast-tracked at the highest diplomatic level, once the film had been seen by both the Home Office and Foreign Office. He is now living with his family in the north of England, and says he is happy and settled.

“It’s very, very cold after Zimbabwe, of course, but my family are finding life is so much better here,” he said yesterday. “In Zimbabwe, you had to queue for cooking oil, you had to queue for sugar, you even had to queue for water from the well. There are shortages of everything. Also, we have found the English to be so tolerant compared to people in Zimbabwe. Everyone has been accepting us as we are.”

He said he had been motivated to study for a degree in applied science and forensic investigation at Teesside university by the abduction and murder of a former colleague and friend in Zimbabwe. There had been completely inadequate facilities for investigating the death, he said.

“Everyone knew he was abducted,” said Yuda, “and there was a lot of evidence that was left in different places but there was no proper investigation carried out. We had to wait for a pathologist to come from South Africa to carry out a postmortem.”

He hoped that, if there was finally a change of government in Zimbabwe, he would be able to return and help investigate the murder. He said that his course was a good one, although he had had to adjust to using computers, to which there is limited access in Zimbabwe.

“I hope and pray that change will come in Zimbabwe,” said Yuda, “but I fear that it may take many years. It is very clear that Mugabe is not interested in sharing power or opening the country up to democracy. He is only interested in hanging on to power for himself and his cronies.”

He said that he now supported international military intervention to remove Mugabe. “People are perishing there now, they are using the military to kill unarmed civilians. The only way to save lives is by intervention.”

He has received death threats from “war veterans” – Mugabe supporters – in Britain. “They are accusing me of being a sell-out and saying that they will kill me,” he said. He was also concerned about harassment of relatives and friends in Zimbabwe. “I am very worried about my relatives.”

There is an active Zimbabwe exile community in the UK and Yuda has met many of its members and addressed meetings in Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle, to bring them up to date on the situation in their country.

His wife, Mejury, gave birth to their first son, Clint, shortly after arriving in England. “Many years ago, when I was just a boy in the 1980s, Clint Eastwood was in the country making a film and I met him then. What has been happening to us is a bit like a dramatic film, so I felt that Clint would be a good name for our son.”

Clint has two older sisters, Flora and Clara, who, said Yuda, were adapting well to Britain. “Life is good for them,” he said. “Here in Britain is the best life you can live.” One of the pleasures of living in England, he said, was that he might get the chance to watch Liverpool, the team he has supported since boyhood days in Zimbabwe.

The escape last summer was on a knife-edge right up to the last minute, he said, because there had been difficulty obtaining a passport for his children. Eventually, he persuaded his bosses at the prison to sign a letter supporting his request, on the grounds that he was only going for a brief holiday. The authorities were inevitably angered by the film, which exposed corruption and intimidation, and tried to track him down. “When the film was shown, they thought I was still in Zimbabwe and they set up roadblocks to try and catch me,” he said.

Yuda, who had worked for 13 years in the Zimbabwe prison system, made the film using a hidden camera in the hope that it would draw further attention to the violence and corruption in Zimbabwe. Much of the footage was shot inside the country’s notorious jail system.

He was particularly motivated by the violence directed towards the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and the murder, two months before he fled, of his uncle, who was an MDC activist. “I had never seen that kind of violence before,” said Yuda, of the run-up to the election. “How can a government that claimed to be democratically elected kill its people, murder its people, torture its people?”

The original plan for the filming was to show what life was like inside Zimbabwe’s prison system but, by chance, Yuda was present with his hidden camera when a Mugabe supporter organised vote-rigging by getting fellow prison officers to fill in their postal ballots in his presence. He also obtained footage of Zanu-PF rallies where voters were told to pretend to be illiterate so that an official could fill in their ballot for them on behalf of Mugabe.

The film was posted on the guardian.co.uk website in July last year and also broadcast on BBC2’s Newsnight.

More than 130,000 voters spoiled their ballot papers in the election in protest at what they believed would be a stolen election.

“I don’t regret doing this, although it is a painful decision I have taken,” he said at the time of leaving Zimbabwe. “We can live without the memories of seeing dead bodies in the prison, dead bodies in the street, dead bodies in my family. I’ve lost my uncle. My father was also beaten by Zanu-PF. I am praying to God: please, God, deal with Zanu-PF ruthlessly.” – guardian.co.uk

Link to this video