Makarau fighting a lost battle Justice Rita Makarau
Justice Rita Makarau

Justice Rita Makarau

Joram Nyathi Spectrum—

I WANT to believe a free and fair election should be one which reflects the will of the people, not the wishes of a political party. That means every political party wishing to contest in an election must appeal to what a majority of people who qualify and are willing to vote want.That being the case, an electoral system must allow for the greatest possible number of eligible voters to do so on election day.

But in the end, it must be submitted that no amount of tinkering with the electoral system can alter the outcome if a political party cannot convert voters to support its policy propositions.

Zimbabwe has had problems with its electoral outcomes in the past few years because there is a tendency to focus too much on the electoral system and personalities rather than policy issues: My party must win because it is my party, because I support its leader, and because I don’t like the other parties regardless of their policies.

If my party loses an election, the election must have been rigged.

I become so many people who voted for my party.

Because nobody could possibly vote for the other political party. There must be something wrong with the electoral system because the outcome doesn’t reflect my wishes.

Because we tend to associate with people of a like mind, we want to believe those with different views must be a minority, are wrong and will lose.

Often that is what gatherings at rallies tell us. We are all sitting down or standing and are all equal.

We become more than the reality because of the illusion of what we see.

When we lose the election we want to blame others for it, or to impugn the electoral system.

It must favour our enemies or it must have been manipulated.

Over time we have overplayed this “rigged election” cant that a clean loss or win has become nearly impossible.

Faith and confidence in our own systems doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t make the system wrong or faulty.

Simply that the will and wishes of the people don’t always coincide with the wishes of political parties or their leaders.

Often the victor is one who nearly speaks to the anxieties of the majority of those who are eligible to vote, and do indeed vote at the appointed time.

Those who lose it’s not necessarily because the system favoured the victors.

Makarau and ZEC

There are many recent examples, from Colombia to Greece, where referendums have yielded “undesirable” upshots.

But the more pronounced include the British voting to leave the European Union.

It’s not an outcome David Cameron ever imagined could cost him the premiership.

Then we have the talk of town: rational American voters giving the world a president we were made to believe they themselves didn’t want, Donald Trump.

The American mainstream media led everyone down a garden path reflective more of their own wishes than the will of the voters.

That is why I feel sorry for Justice Rita Makarau.

I have no doubt that Justice Makarau and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission are acting in uttermost good faith in trying to accommodate the wishes and pleadings of opposition parties and civic society groups.

But they are fighting a losing battle in the so-called electoral reforms given the adversarial nature of their engagements.

I doubt there is anything so decidedly lopsided in favour of Zanu-PF in the Electoral Act that can be fixed by ZEC without it completely losing control of the electoral processes and creating room for anarchy and lawlessness. Its very integrity is being put on trial.

In October, when it looked like things were going really bad for him, Trump complained about the November 8 ballot being rigged.

There were alien voters.

There were dead voters on the roll.

President Obama was forced to step in, warning the Republican candidate not to impugn the American electoral system.

“If whenever things are going badly for you, you start blaming somebody else, then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job,” said Obama.

“There are a lot of times things don’t go our way or my way . . . that’s Okay, you fight through it.”

At some point Trump did manage to nail who was rigging the election: “The Press has created a rigged system and poisoned the minds of voters,” he said.

It was Obama again who pointed Trump in the right direction, although this was meant to deflect his complaints about rigging.

He told Trump on October 18, “I would invite Mr Trump to stop whining and go to try to make his case to get votes.”

We all know what Trump did and the outcome.

He fought through it, made his case to the voters and got their vote against the grain.

Never mind the conflict between the popular vote won by Hillary Clinton and the Electoral College system which favoured Trump. (It’s like self-indulgent local analysts repeating ad nauseam that Tsvangirai beat Mugabe in the 2008 elections to become president while they ignore a constitutional requirement that the winner must get 50+1 percent of the ballot.)

Makarau and her ZEC have their local Trumps, so to speak.

They have taken away the voters’ roll from Tobaiwa Mudede.

They want a new one.

They see dead or ghost voters everywhere.

They want people to vote everywhere, no, in their constituencies, no, in their wards. But no, voters will be intimidated because they are known.

They want a biometric voting system.

But then there are criminal marking pens which favour Zanu-PF.

They want a special vote for the diaspora, aliens, prisoners and those in hospitals.

They want to be involved in the registration and accreditation of election monitors and observers. Not to mention the obsession with Western election observers.

They want to be involved in mapping of ward boundaries and in the appointment of the ZEC secretariat, where everyone who has previously served in the security service is a persona non grata.

There should be no more official secrecy relating to elections, presumably so that anyone can announce or publish the results from anywhere!

A Martian would think we had never held an election in this beautiful country since Cecil John Rhodes crossed the Limpopo River. But that is to miss the point, and I am not saying there is no merit in opposition demands.

There is a lot which can be done to improve our electoral system. It’s not unique.

My point is simply that a perfect electoral system can be no substitute for enduring national values, policies which empower the people and national heritage.

This interminable litany of demands doesn’t address that.

Instead it takes us back to 2008.

It anticipates and justifies a disputed election outcome in 2018.

The GNU suffered because there were people who brought into it the baggage of “outstanding issues” and a desire to grab power from within.

These demands cannot all be met before elections in 2018 even if Zanu-PF were to abdicate its mandate to govern the country and devote all its energies and resources to trying to legislate itself out of power, a burden now contracted to Makarau and ZEC.

Meaning, as we get closer to 2018, debate in the opposition and their foreign advisors will revert to 2013: to participate or not to participate in the elections because not all electoral reforms have been carried out.

One can’t have enough political will to do the impossible. Trump was fortunate it was just the Press which had “rigged the system” and “poisoned the minds of voters”.

In Zimbabwe the Press, the opposition and civic society share the guilt in equal portions. Best of luck Lady Makarau.

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