The chaos, violence and rigging that has characterised Zanu PF primary elections is clearly indicative of the party’s inherent nature whose bullish shenanigans have this time around been aggravated by its unpreparedness for polls.
NewsDay Editorial
A few weeks before the party went for its primaries, we reported that Zanu PF was so broke it was not able to pay workers at its offices countrywide. The party officials responded by saying lack of money had nothing to do with elections and that their primaries would not be affected by that.
What we saw obtaining at the party’s polling stations countrywide on Tuesday, however, showed how crippling shortages of money impacted on elections. It also confirmed, in much stronger terms, that the issue of lack of resources could have been a deliberate move by the party’s unpopular deadwood to create conditions conducive for electoral theft.
How does a party like Zanu PF, born in 1963 and whose leaders are “credited” with milking this country dry through the plunder of national resources like diamonds, daylight robbery of private companies under the guise of indigenisation and the looting and stripping of the country’s entire agricultural sector, run an election the way we saw on Tuesday?
Reports were that the “revolutionary party” resorted to using bond paper and cardboard, cut into small pieces to make ballot papers, which were then cast into cardboard boxes taken from local supermarkets so that they could be used as ballot boxes!
Even in this embarrassingly rudimentary form, the party’s electoral process was reportedly marred by a shortage of “voting material”! The party could not put together enough bond paper and cardboard to supply its polling stations. Many polling centres had — by end of business on Tuesday — not received voting material resulting in elections being postponed to yesterday.
National chairman Simon Khaya Moyo, however, told party faithfuls on national television elections had gone “very well”, but still conceded that although the party had planned to have the elections in one day (Tuesday), polling would still be taking place on Wednesday, because of “logistical” problems encountered in some areas. He said nothing about the party’s failure to print ballot papers and resorting to bond paper and cardboard!
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The Zanu PF primaries were also not devoid of drama — violent in some instances. There were reported cases where the ZRP, which ordinarily should have nothing to do with intra-party voting procedures, was summoned to “arrest” a faction supporter who had been caught red-handed stuffing handfuls of pieces of marked bond paper into the “ballot box”.
Somewhere in the Midlands, the son of Governor Jason Machaya, Raffy, was said to have grabbed the ballot box and run away from the polling station with it because he was not too happy with the “rigging”. He was reportedly chased, caught and beaten up by angry supporters of a rival faction.
This is a clear example of how not to hold elections and Zanu PF, being the party clamouring for quick elections, should not expose the nation to this mess of an election.
