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NewsDay

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Is something being hidden on poll funding?

Opinion & Analysis
So much intrigue surrounds the issue of elections in Zimbabwe that it becomes very difficult for a fair-minded citizen to make head or tail of the prevailing scenario.

So much intrigue surrounds the issue of elections in Zimbabwe that it becomes very difficult for a fair-minded citizen to make head or tail of the prevailing scenario.

NewsDay Editorial

There is the issue of the election dates whose debate and arguments have visited Parliament, Cabinet, the Global Political Agreement principals’ Monday meetings, the country’s highest court of law and even Sadc, our government’s midwife — all without resolve.

Then there is the voter registration matter, steeped in confusion, chaos and controversy — again without solution or clarity on what is going on with the exercise where officials appear determined to frustrate citizens from voting. And yet still, the critical issue of levelling the electoral playground — determined by a straight and hurdle-free roadmap — remains a sticking issue.

But above all, there is the enabling factor, without which none of the above matters can be resolved — the issue of money.  What we have been told by the Finance minister, Tendai Biti, is that the country has no money to fund elections.

He said the country could have received money — enough to run a successful plebiscite — from the United Nations, but there were his colleagues in government, in particular Justice minister Patrick Chinamasa who, on apparent instruction from his party, told the world body to go to hell with its money.

This can only suggest that they have something to hide. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which is mandated to run our polls, has said it is ready to do so (if the money to carry out its mandate is provided).

But because there is no money, we have already witnessed unacceptable compromises in the voter registration exercise where teams from the Registrar-General’s Office are said to be visiting combined wards (instead of one ward per time) for three (instead of 30) days per ward and without the requisite equipment like cameras and generators.

President Robert Mugabe has declared elections must be held in exactly six weeks from today, but does not say where the money will come from. On the road to Maputo where he was asked to reconsider his proclamation, Mugabe and his party were claiming the Sadc summit was to do with the issue of electoral funding — but as it turned out, the summit said nothing about money for Zimbabwe’s polls!

Our perennial financial saviour, the United Nations Development Programme, has backed off saying it is now too late to provide money for polls, even if government swallowed its pride and asked for it.

Meanwhile, our local presumed source — Marange diamonds — is a non-starter. We were told last week by Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Mines and Energy that hundreds of millions of dollars from Chiadzwa diamonds have disappeared without trace.

Three companies operating at Marange diamond fields, which are believed to have the capacity to supply 25% of the world’s diamond needs, refused to say how much money they had remitted to Treasury and Finance minister Biti has openly declared he never got a cent of that money — save for trifles, not enough to make a dent in the nation’s miserable budget.

So what are we doing — stampeding the nation into an election without money while allowing known individuals and partisan institutions to plunder our national resource in broad daylight?