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The MDC leader Douglas Mwonzora has claimed the crunch 2023 general elections are already rigged.
Mwonzora’s sentiment comes days after the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) chairperson, Priscilla Chigumba, recently handed the delimitation report to President Emmerson Mnangagwa at State House.
After handing the report to Mnangagwa, Justice Priscilla Chigumba told journalists that she is confident the President will approve the revised delimitation report, which she noted is cognizant of concerns that were raised by stakeholders, including parliament.
But addressing journalists in Harare yesterday, Mwonzora said it was impossible for ZEC to conduct delimitation exercises without census results.
He adjured opposition political parties to unite and speak with one voice, so that ZEC will implement luminous electoral reforms.
“What we want to say is that the opposition must put aside their political differences and speak with one voice.
“The delimitation report is incurably defective. The major reason for its defect is that it did not consider population density in our country, because the population results are not yet out.
“Already there are total signs that the election is rigged. That delimitation report is a rigging mechanism, and we are not going to accept that,” he said.
Despite Mwonzora’s utterances, Speaker of the National Assembly, Jacob Mudenda, supported ZEC’s preliminary delimitation report, saying all processes to produce the report were done above board.
Mudenda was responding to a Constitutional Court application by Zanu-PF activist Tonderai Chidawa, who had demanded that the report be investigated first by Parliament.
Chidawa had demanded that the proceedings that took place in Parliament since the tabling of the preliminary delimitation report on January 6 should be nullified as they failed to comply with the Constitution.
In response, Mudenda said what Chidawa was asking Parliament to do is unconstitutional.
He said “Parliament was not required to conduct any investigations under section 161(8) of the Constitution, other than to consider or analyse the report which the President caused to be laid before it in terms of section 161(7) of the Constitution. The document, which is allegedly authored by the seven Zec commissioners, did not disown the preliminary delimitation report,” he said in his response.
“It is more of an expression of opinion by the seven commissioners, and they never affirmed that the delimitation exercise was hijacked by one or two commissioners as alleged, or at all. Their opinion is that the delimitation exercise was not people-centered, and that the format of the report was difficult to understand; issues which Parliament could also pick by considering the same report under section 161(8) of the Constitution.”
Efforts to get a comment from ZEC spokesperson, Jasper Mangwana, were fruitless at the time of this publication, as he said he was busy with other commitments.
