(Last Updated on July 24, 2013 by Editor)
THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission should rein in MDC-T leader Mr Morgan Tsvangirai and his party over their unsubstantiated statements alleging that the commission was rigging the harmonised elections through several tactics, legal experts and political analysts said yesterday.
The electoral commission is a Constitutional body that was set up with input from all three main political parties in Government who recommended commissioners and agreed on the commission chairperson.
Despite this, the MDC-T leadership have been on a campaign to discredit ZEC as part of their campaign to trash the electoral environment creating the impression that the Commission reports to Zanu-PF.
ZEC has challenged the MDC-T and all who claim the voters roll was manipulated to avail the evidence; the MDC-T was still to meet the challenge.
The analysts yesterday said the claims by the MDC-T were inflammatory as they were designed to incite supporters to violence before and after the polls.
The MDC-T has accused ZEC of manipulating the voters’ roll in a bid to favour Zanu-PF, claiming that two million potential voters aged under 30 years are unregistered while over one million people on the voters’ roll are either dead or migrated.
Statements that have since been disproved by statistics released by the Registrar General of Voters Office which shows that 94 percent of eligible voters are registered to vote putting Zimbabwe third out of 10 countries in Sadc that held elections since 2009.
The RG’s office, earlier this year, also removed over one million people who died between 1985 and May 1 this year from the voters roll.
Mr Terrence Hussein of Hussein, Ranchhod and Company said any allegations of rigging should be supported by evidence in the court of law. He said the fact that the MDC-T had no evidence meant they were politicking.
“Such utterances are common from people who are not sure of themselves,” he said. “There is no reason to pre-judge the elections unless one has concrete evidence. With that evidence in hand one can quickly approach the court and present it then the law will act accordingly. Just utterances without doing anything means these are just political tricks.”