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NewsDay

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Chickens have come home to roost

Opinion & Analysis
Zanu PF has sensationally and embarrassingly conceded that the country’s voters’ roll is in a shambles and needed a complete overhaul.

FINALLY, the chickens have come home to roost! Zanu PF has sensationally and embarrassingly conceded that the country’s voters’ roll is in a shambles and needed a complete overhaul.

NewsDay Editorial

The party, through its secretary for security Sydney Sekeremayi, at the weekend shocked all and sundry when he claimed that the MDC-T were manipulating the voters’ roll through registering their supporters using other people’s houses and unoccupied hostels in Marondera.

On Monday Sekeremayi registered an official complaint on the matter with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission.

Zanu PF has over the years ignored calls by progressive forces that the voters’ roll and registration exercise should be revamped. The roll worked in its favour then and we have no doubt it still does today.

The Registrar-General’s office has over the years manipulated the voters’ roll to deliver electoral victory to President Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF on a silver platter.

Voter registration has been abused to achieve parochial political objectives.

The voters’ roll has, and remains, in a shambles thanks to the Registrar-General’s Office.

Despite recent efforts to clean-up the roll, a lot needs to be done. There is a clear need for a complete overhaul of the voters’ roll to flush out the dead and children under the legal age of majority, 18 years.

Overhauling the voters’ roll should be one of the key reforms before we go for elections later this year.

The reforms will guarantee the peoples’ vote and ensure that the outcome of the polls would not be contested. We don’t need a second government of national unity. We need conditions for sustainable elections in the country.

Our rulers should put in place measures to guarantee the security and integrity of the vote; the security of the person; and the people’s will.

We also need to accelerate the preparation of a new voters’ roll as well as implement key media, security and legislative reforms.

The country needs to attend to reforms pertaining to freedom of association and freedom of assembly fresh delimitation of constituencies to eliminate gerrymandering, and defining measures and procedures to do with the actual election, for instance, obliging that the President and the Prime Minister to agree on the date of the election.

The people of Zimbabwe should not agree to an election whose outcome can be manipulated and contrived using a shambolic voters’ roll and a brutal security force!