Posted on 04/08/2002 3:41:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The man who knows the secrets of Mugabe's re-election is Tobaiwa Mudede, the Registrar-General, the outspokenly pro-Mugabe official who runs all Zimbabwe's elections. More than a month before the election Mudede told a meeting at the International School in Harare that he could imagine no circumstances in which he would declare anyone other than Mugabe the election winner. Pictures in the state-run Herald of how the results were announced are almost beyond parody. In the centre sits Obriel Mpofu, who announced the results on TV, flanked by Mudede and a series of other Mugabe loyalists, including the Police Commissioner, Augustine Chihuri, in full uniform. These are not only the men who know the secrets of the results but the men who, in large part, manufactured them.
A great deal of the mystery of Zimbabwean elections resides in the electoral register. Although the law says that the public have the right to inspect the register at will, in practise Mudede keeps it a tight secret. It took the Zimbabwe Civic Education Trust (Zimcet) no less than four court orders to finally get Mudede to allow them to see a copy - making them the first citizens ever to see the document - and despite three further court orders requiring him to show them the supplementary voters' roll, he has still to comply with that request.
The register Zimcet saw of 5.2 million voters was supposed to be closed. However, in the remaining two months Zanu-PF rushed out and illegally registered 400,000 extra voters in rural areas, all of whom Mudede added to his final roll which came out at 5,612,272 voters. The MDC made urgent application to the Supreme Court that this clandestinely compiled supplementary roll not be used but Mugabe's hand-picked Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku declined to make a ruling on this application - and, indeed, has yet to do so.
It is child's play to show that this voters' roll of 5.6 million is nonsense. The inter-censal survey of 1997 suggests that there are only 12 million Zimbabweans and market research organisations such as Probe Market Research (a Gallup subsidiary) still use that figure today: while the birth rate is high there is also a calamitous Aids death rate and many continue to leave to seek work in South Africa. With an average family size of six children, over 50% of Zimbabweans are under 15 and 60% are under 18. This leaves only 4.8 million adults of voting age. Probe's research shows that the maximum who have ever registered to vote is 80%, suggesting that the maximum number of names on the roll should be 3,840,000. Thus around 1.8 million of the people on Mudede's roll do not really exist - thus providing him and Zanu-PF with a vast reservoir of fictional voters who can be "mobilised" at will when the going gets tough.
Zimcet's audit of the roll - carried out for them by Probe on a representative national sample - reveals that only 50% of the names on the roll actually live at the addresses given and are thus entitled to vote in their constituency. Generously assuming that a further 10% have moved but stayed within the same constituency, Zimcet came up with the figure of only a maximum of 2,304,600 being legally able to vote (ie 60% of 3,840,000). Even if one then assumes a voter turnout of 75%, this means that the number of votes cast could not exceed 1,728,450. Let us, however, be generous and assume that the total population is 12.5 million, that the over-18 population is thus 5 million, that the maximum number on the roll is thus 4 million. With only 60% of them then being found in their right constituencies there would then be 2.4 million legally entitled voters which, on a 75% turnout, comes to 1.8 million votes actually cast. Even if one bumps this figure up a little to allow for army/police/other public servants allowed a postal vote out of their constituency it is difficult to see how one gets to 1.9 million votes cast. In addition, however, let us assume - generously - that as many as 200,000 voters now living outside their constituencies travel back there in order to vote. This would bring total votes cast to 2.1 million.
In practise, though, the number was bound to be very much lower because of the strenuous attempts made by the Mugabe government to strike opposition voters off the roll. First, anyone with any claim to a foreign passport (often even if they had renounced such a claim) was struck off, including even Sir Garfield Todd, a citizen of 67 years' standing. Then the million Zimbabweans abroad were disenfranchised and many scores of thousands of farmworkers were driven off their farms and out of the constituencies in which they were registered. And, most notoriously of all, the government went to elaborate lengths to depress turnout in the opposition's urban bastions, reducing the number of polling stations to the point where it would have taken Harare citizens nine whole days to vote if they had all tried to. This made certain that turnout was far less than 75%. Indeed, in the biggest province - Harare - turnout was under 50%, by express design.
According to Mudede the results were as follows:
Registered voters: 5,612,272
Total votes cast: 3,048,752
Mugabe 1,688,939
Tsvangirai 1,254,930
Kumbele 31,179
Maya 12,376
Siwela 12,169
Spoilt 49,156
(Oddly, the totals in the second column come to 3,048,749 - leaving 3 votes missing.)
In fact these numbers are quite impossible. Fraud is not only patent but clearly took place on an overwhelming scale. The key was the fact that the MDC were unable to monitor 52% of polling stations and 9/120 counting stations. The name of the game was stuffed ballot boxes. But it was perfectly clear, even by March 10, what was going on - with huge turnouts being recorded for Mashonaland villages in which observers saw almost no one queueing to vote at all. The Economist (March 16, p.29) records some of the absurdities this produced with villages of 300 producing turnouts of 1,000 and so on. But it is important to start from the global situation set out below.
Even if one takes the higher population estimate any figure of over 1.9 million voters is suspect and any figure above 2.1 million is a downright fraud. In fact, according to Mudede no less than 3,048,752 people voted. The implication is that somewhere between and 900,000 to 1.1 million votes were manufactured. It's not difficult to see how. According to Zimcet 27% of the names on the register were either dead, abroad or no one at all knew where they were. It's quite possible that Mudede has just been leaving dead people's names on the list for years and years past. In addition, of course, huge numbers more are now living out of their constituencies so if someone votes in their name in their constituency this can only be because they have travelled the necessary distance to do so - or by fraud.
One begins to understand why Mudede has been so reluctant to allow anyone to inspect the roll, indeed why he has defied repeated court orders requiring him to do so, and why he has also turned down generous offers from foreign donors to help carry out a comprehensive re-organisation and verification of the roll. As it is the roll is a shambles - Zimcet found that only 31% of the population actually appeared on the roll in the constituency in which they said they had registered - but it has been an extremely useful shambles for Zanu-PF. One result of the work Zimcet and I have done to date is to make one realise that the official turnout given for the 2000 parliamentary elections of 2,490,496 is also way too high. In those elections the MDC trailed with 47.1% to Zanu-PF's 48.3% - on the official figures. In fact, putting together the Zimcet figures with the fact that in two separate Probe surveys which I carried out on the 2000 elections the figure for turnout varied between 69% and 71% - which one may standardise at 70%. Assuming that the higher figure of 2.4 million were legally entitled to vote, one may calculate that the right number of votes cast should have been 1,680,000 plus, again, 100,000 postal votes from public servants plus 200,000 more travelling back to their home constituencies to vote - giving 1,980,000 votes as a maximum
The implication is that the MDC would really have won the June 2000 elections handily but for a minimum of 510,000 manufactured votes. If we assume that all these votes were Zanu-PF votes and that the figures for Others (115,000) and MDC (1,172,000) were genuine, one may recalculate those figures. On that assumption we find that the MDC would have won 59.2% of the vote to Zanu-PF's 35% and Others 5.8%, a landslide which would have robbed Mugabe of a parliamentary majority - and thus control of the government - two years ago. Thus massive electoral fraud is not new in Zimbabwe: without it Mugabe would have been out of power some time ago.
We are now in a position to understand the even greater fraud perpetrated last week. The first element was, of course, terror. In 2000 we found in two separate surveys that 13% of voters admitted that they had voted against "the party I really preferred" because of intimidation. We suspect that the real number was greater, not only because 31% of voters said they knew people who had voted in this fashion but because it is rather humiliating - and perhaps unsafe - for voters to own up to having been successfully bullied. Be that as it may, the scale of terror in 2002 was vastly greater than in 2000. The number of voters forced to vote against their convictions by direct physical threat must have been at least 13% again - and was probably far more. Throughout the province of Mashonaland West men were noticed sitting in polling stations taking the names of those who voted and in what order, a clearly intimidatory device for villagers had been told it would then be possible to divine how each of them had voted - and woe betide those had cast a ballot against Mugabe.
Second, there were the deliberate disenfranchisements noted above - and third the forcible way in which police and army personnel were made to cast postal ballots for Mugabe under the eyes of the authorities: angry letters from policemen made to vote thus against their will are now appearing pseudonymously in the independent press here.
Fourth, there was the deliberate ruses used to prevent voters in Harare from being able to cast their ballots - the insistence, against court rulings, on having council and mayoral elections on the same day in the capital so that voting would take three times longer; the illegal closure of polling stations for many hours, also in the face of court rulings; the deliberately slow handling of voters by officials within the stations which sometimes slowed throughput to as little as 20 voters an hour; the use of police to harass and tear-gas voting queues and of Zanu-PF youths to barge into the queues, creating disturbances and frightening the timid away and, when they had voted, to stand in the queues again in order to lengthen them; and then the arrest of people in particularly long queues for "attempting to vote twice".
But most of all there was ballot-stuffing. As one examines the results one can see that this must have gone on quite generally. In the MDC strongholds of Harare, Bulawayo and the two Matebeleland provinces not only was turnout down but, in the last two months when 400,000 names were clandestinely added to the rolls, the numbers registered in these four provinces either stagnated or actually fell - an astonishing outcome. Across the country MDC monitors were abducted, arrested, assaulted or chased away from 52% of all polling stations, according to their candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai - thus creating the possibility for the police to ship in extra ballot boxes full of Mugabe votes, doubtless prepared well in advance. Given that the officials in charge of polling stations were army, police, civil servants or war vets all hand-picked for their pro-government loyalties, the insertion of these boxes would not have been difficult. Then, in nine of the 120 counting stations the MDC agents watching the account were jailed, assaulted or driven away. In all nine cases there were large and unaccountable increases in turnout - with over 60,000 extra votes cast than the doubtless already inflated totals for 2000 - massively in favour of Mugabe.
Only the addition of these extra boxes of Mugabe votes can account for the fact that turnout soared in all the safest Zanu-PF areas even though observers on the ground found almost no one voting there on the second day and generally predicted a very low turnout there. Thus compared to turnout in 2000 (an already inflated figure) turnout rose by 82,000, 80,000 and 60,000 in the three Mashonaland provinces, by 96,000 in Masvingo, 90,000 in Manicaland and 78,000 in Midlands - while in the MDC areas it rose little or actually fell. What is particularly striking was the ability of the government to achieve politically convenient results in particular areas. Thus Manicaland had swung clearly to the MDC in 2000, much to Mugabe's fury and Zanu-PF was determined to get it back. This was more or less impossible given that Ndabaningi's Zanu-Ndonga party, which had always retained some support there, had won a substantial bloc of votes in Manicaland in 2000 but was now not running a candidate against Tsvangirai in 2002. Yet somehow the votes piled up so exactly that Mugabe came out just 3,000 ahead in Manicaland and was thus able to claim a triumph there. Or again, all the early polls seemed to suggest that the MDC would win Masvingo handsomely - especially since it had won the Masvingo municipal elections earlier in the year in the teeth of a ferocious Zanu-PF terror campaign - and this time it had the clear support of the province's dominant personality, the Zanu-PF veteran Eddison Zvobgo. Throughout the campaign Zanu-PF tried desperately to suggest that Zvobgo was on Mugabe's side, only for Zvobgo to rebut all such suggestions with indignation. But the large expected MDC vote in Masvingo was overwhelmed by a huge and inexplicable Zanu-PF tide.
Similarly, Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe's Information Minister, had been humiliatingly beaten by more than 2:1 in Tsholotsho in 2000 - it was one of the safest MDC seats in the country. Thus it was of great symbolic importance for Moyo that Mugabe should win Tsholotsho this time - and so, miraculously, he did, by just 0.5%.on a swing suspiciously four times higher than the national average. Or again, it was of symbolic importance for Mugabe that he win his birthplace of Zvimba by a particularly large margin - and so he did, so much so that in Zvimba South (a tiny village) more votes were cast than in large town like Kwekwe in the Midlands - a complete absurdity. In the constituency of Mudzi Mugabe excelled himself by achieving the miracle of a 100% turnout. But the beauty of Mudede's voters' roll is that there are so many dead or non-existent people on it that there is huge room for ballot-stuffing without such suspicious results really being necessary at all. Nonetheless, the sudden addition of large numbers of votes - commentators noted how during the count the total votes cast leapt from one moment to the next from 2.5 million to 2.9 million and then on up - did have some problems, notably in the wide disparities seen between the results provided by Mudede and those stemming from the (army-staffed) Electoral Supervisory Commission.
As we have seen the number of manufactured votes in 2002 was somewhere between 900,000 and 1.1 million. It must have been the work of many months to get this many ballots filled in, ballot boxes sealed etc - that is, the fraud must have been devised and carried out a long time back. This would, of course, explain Mugabe and Zanu-PF's air of blithe confidence in a campaign which on any normal basis they should have expected to lose. One would, at the least, have expected to see Mugabe wear an air of frantic worry. We now see why he was so serene. In fact, it seems certain that despite the effects of terror and intimidation that he did actually lose the election quite heavily. For one must assume that the 900,000 - 1.1 million manufactured votes were all cast for him and his winning margin was given as 434,009. Even if we take the lower number of 900,000 stuffed ballots then it would appear that Tsvangirai actually won the election by 466,000 votes - that is, Mugabe's correct total should have been just under 790,000.
The extraordinary thing is that only the Norwegian observers seem to have spent any time considering the defects of the register. Most of the African observers were so concerned to find the elections free and fair that they actually delivered their verdicts before the results containing these extraordinary anomalies were even declared. In the extreme case of the South African observers, who had arrived with strict instructions to legitimate Comrade Mugabe's victory, almost all the observers had returned home even before the results came out.
RW Johnson has carried out six opinion surveys in Zimbabwe. An Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, he has taught political science at the universities of East Anglia, Oxford, the Sorbonne (Paris), Natal and Cape Town. Formerly director of the Helen Suzman Foundation, he is the author of six books and many articles in academic journals and the international press.
Did Mugabe have Al Gore's campaign manager?
 AfricaWatch: for AfricaWatch articles. Other Bump Lists at: Free Republic Bump List Register |
The repeat of old, old patterns is depressingly familiar:
1- disarm
2- divide
3- silence opposition
4- vote fraud
Soon ther will be external threats ( imagined ), show trials, anarchy, and famine. Pity about.... Rhodesia!
I have no doubt there was voter fraud.
The subtilte should read Democracy; African style
Come to think about it, isn't terrorism, torture and voter fraud a natural outcome of Democracy.
There was a time when the country of Zimbabwe represented the hopes and the aspirations of the entire African continent…it had democratic institutions, and blacks and whites lived together in relative prosperity…. With independence, [Robert Mugabe] preached conciliation and convinced many whites to stay on and participate in a new democracy. But this past year, things have gone terribly wrong in Zimbabwe....
So much potential for good, to die aborning. And all so drearily predictable.
No doubt there was voter fraud. But to think over half of Gores votes were false gives way to much credit to American's thinking skills. Unfortunately most of his votes were real votes. IMO an indictment of the the publics political discernment.
When will their consituents say enough? I guess they'll just manufacture more.
Mugabe's opposition isn't going quitely this time.
And this, dear friends, is what happened in 2000 in the USA and will happen again in 2002 as well.
MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD, and INTIMIDATIONS SO BOLD AND BLATANT only the willingly blind could deny them (primarily in minority dominated precincts where the NAACP and/or Union Thugs walked voters into the booth to be sure they voted the "party" line. This happened in Wake County, North Carolina. If it happened here, it happened throughout the country. And it will happen again in 2002 because the Union Thugs and the NAACP are still at work promoting Marxist Terrorism against those who would oppose their "agenda". No, it's not as bad as in Zimbabwe.
NOT YET!
Bump!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.