SW Radio Africa news - The Independent Voice of Zimbabwe
Despite assurances that lessons had been learned from an earlier shambolic 20-day mobile voter registration programme, concerns have been raised about the current process which some have described as ‘slow and painful’.
The ongoing 30-day voter registration campaign is a mandatory step towards the election, as stipulated in the country’s new constitution.
The initial 20-day trial run, conducted from April 29th to May 19th, was widely discredited, with irregularities ranging from names of ghost voters on the roll, lack of voter education, partisan allocation of centres and suspicions that registration officers were deliberately slowing down the process for political reasons.
The current campaign started on June 10th amid a fair amount of publicity and hopes had been raised that maybe this time around the process would be less controversial than its predecessor.
But a few days into the exercise it emerged that Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede had slashed the number of days that registration teams would spend in each ward from the original 30 to 3, raising fears that many people will be left out.
Mudede blamed a lack of funding for the unconstitutional move, which also saw wards being bunched together.
Harare East legislator Tendai Biti, who visited one registration centre in his urban constituency over the weekend, used Facebook to share his observations of what he described as “a charade of deception”.
Biti wrote: “On Friday, despite a kilometre-long queue (at Courtney Selous Primary) they only registered about 250 persons. Yesterday when I left they had registered 270. There was a deliberate and systematic disenfranchisement of our people being executed by Tobaiwa Mudede and the chaos faction.
“This was taking place countrywide. If they can do what they were doing in broad daylight, in one of Harare’s most enlightened suburbs, Greendale, what more (the rural areas of) Gwelutshena, Gumunyu, Rasa or Bare?” Biti wondered.
Biti also raised concern over the bussing in and preferential treatment of security personnel by ZEC officials stationed at Courtney Selous Primary, which he said was a repeat of what happened at Tafara Community Hall, in Ward 46.
“Our monitoring team puts the number of these youths who have been registered just at Courtney Selous alone, at 700. They had a special line, receiving preferential treatment — making our case that ZEC staff need to be changed.”
Silobela MP Anadi Sululu, who is part of the parliamentary committee on defence and home affairs, told SW Radio Africa that similar concerns had been raised in the Tiger Reef area of Kwekwe.
“This is very worrying, and we all know the political party that is doing this. And Mudede’s clustering of wards is to blame for the long queues that Biti mentions.
“In my rural constituency for example, Ward 21 alone has more than 5,000 people and if officials are attending to 250 people per day as Biti observed, it means that when they move after three days, only 750 would have either registered or checked their names,” Sululu said Monday.
Last week, the committee went on a week-long countrywide assessment of the registration process. But the team will not be able to report back as committees have already been suspended ahead of the dissolution of parliament on June 28th.
Sululu said part of the recommendations his team would have made was for ZEC to spend more than three days in wards where demand for the teams’ services is high, amid reports that in some urban areas people are queuing for more than seven hours to be attended to.
Poll observer group the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network (ZESN) noted last week that most people were finding “the process very frustrating”, with some forced to travel long distances to get to centres.
“With regards to the issue of aliens, ZESN noted that potential registrants were referred back to the RG’s office in their districts for them to address issues such as long birth certificates with no ID numbers and, in some instances, they were asked to surrender their original IDs and re-join the queue to get new IDs, then wait to collect new ones and then re-join a queue to register to vote.”
One would-be voter who waited seven hours at CJ Hall in Highfield, Harare, summed up his experience to the Standard newspaper as “just slow and painful”.