MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa has assembled a team of
legal experts to sift through the electoral data and mount a strong challenge
against President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s recent electoral victory.
Addressing the media yesterday, Chamisa’s spokesperson
Nkululeko Sibanda said the team was working flat out to finalise their papers
to launch a court challenge to overturn the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission
(Zec)’s declaration of Mnangagwa as President-elect.
Sibanda said Chamisa’s legal team would advise the nation
today when they will file the court challenge at the Electoral Court, but
warned with limited prospects of success in the country’s somewhat captured
judiciary; the party had a cocktail of other measures to secure the people’s
“stolen” vote.
“We have a basket of approaches to ensure that the election
does not remain stolen,” Sibanda said.
“The legal route is one of the many ways. We did not put
all our eggs in one basket. The evidence is far glaring to deny that this
election was stolen.
Sibanda reiterated that Chamisa had won the election and
was working with various structures in and outside the party to ensure that the
people’s vote was protected.
“We are not seeking as many would say; to overturn the
elections. The fact of the matter is we have a simple task of overturning the
declaration by Justice Priscilla Chigumba (the Zec chairperson),” he said.
Asked if the MDC Alliance was getting any external support
given that some countries including South Africa had already endorsed Mnangagwa
as winner, Sibanda said those countries that had congratulated the Zanu PF
leader as legitimate President-elect, were doing so the basis of the declared
results.
The MDC Alliance has rejected the poll outcome that gave
Mnangagwa a 50,8% lead on Chamisa who pulled 44,4% of the vote.
Chamisa has vowed to fight the poll outcome, demanding that
Zec release constituency-based tallies.
Zec responded by publishing results by constituencies, but
Sibanda yesterday rubbished the Zec report, saying the figures were
inconsistent and do not tally with the V11 forms in their possession.
He said it was evident in the Zec tallies that Mnangagwa’s
votes where inflated in some areas while Chamisa’s votes were deflated. He said
the data released by Zec had glaring inaccuracies.
He insisted the MDC Alliance agents were left out in the
verification of the presidential votes and also shot down claims that his party
refused to hand in their V11 forms for verification.
“She [Chigumba] is the custodian of the V11 forms. She is
the one who is supposed to produce them, she gives us a copy and keeps
originals so there is no way that she could need them from us. In fact, the
opposition were denied 21% of those because she refused to hand them over. So
there is no way we can give her.
“The fact is, she has the forms, she has to take
information from them and what we do is to provide an agent who then agrees if
the information on our V11 forms tally. We don’t have to give her our V11
forms. It is strange.”
Sibanda said the party had polling agents at most stations
except those polling stations moved by Zec, but said whether or not they did
not manage to get sufficient data, the trajectory with 79% of polling stations
they have data from, they were still winning even if Mnangagwa won in all the
21% polling stations they did not manage to get V11 forms. Newsday
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