Prof Jonathan Moyo says the Harare East result was rigged in favour of Allan Markham. He wrote on Twitter :”Previously, voters in Harare East’s Ward 9 overwhelmingly supported Hon TendaiBiti the current Member of Parliament for the area. But following the recent 2023 delimitation exercise which came up with new electoral boundaries for wards and constituencies, Harare East constituency now consists of Ward 9 which was part of the pre-delimitation Harare East, and Ward 18 which was part of the pre-delimitation Harare North, whose current Member of Parliament is Hon Markham.
So, the new electoral boundaries for Harare East
constituency are made of Harare's wards 9 and 18.
Now, the nub of the issue is this.
In his underhanded campaign to be selected as CCC’s
candidate for Harare East with its new electoral boundaries, Hon Markham used
dirty tactics, name dropping and influence peddling, including threatening to
dismiss the desperate labourers he employs in Ward 9, if they did not ditch Hon
Biti and vote for him.
Against this backdrop, it was diabolic for Hon Markham to conspire with the powers that be in CCC to conduct a selection process under which selectors or voters – many of them Hon Markham’s labourers – were required to queue behind the same Hon Markham, their BOSS. as their 'preferred' parliamentary candidate for Harare East.
It’s a fact that Hon Markham employs cheap labour in Harare
East, and elsewhere around Harare. And it's a fact that the labourers he
employs in Harare East were coerced to vote for him by queuing behind him,
their BOSS, and the explanation for this does not require the interpretive
skills of a rocket scientist.
Only a scoundrel would take this no-brainer explanation as
racism against Hon Markham, the scheming politician.
A candidate selection process for a general election must
not only be fair, it must also be seen to be fair.
It is outrageous that CCC – which has claimed that its
candidate selection process is “most innovative and most democratic” – was
conducted on the basis of the discredited “queue behind your candidate” voting
system or “Bereka Mwana”, as it was called when it was controversially used by
ZanuPF before it was discarded ages ago.
There’s absolutely nothing innovative or democratic about
voting by queuing behind a candidate.
Quite the contrary, that voting method is primitive and
crude, that’s why it has been replaced by the secret vote or secret ballot in
all modern and innovative democratic voting processes.
What made the bad “vote by queuing behind your candidate”
in CCC’s selection process in Harare East worse, is that Hon Markham was
shamelessly and unfairly given the advantage of having his labourers queue
behind him, their BOSS, thereby turning the whole process into a self-evident
charade and a monumental circus to achieve what was manifestly a predetermined
outcome with the following numbers that lacked credibility:
Hon Rusty Markham
Ward 9: 228
Ward 18: 164
Total: 392
Hon Tendai Biti
Ward 9: 254
Ward 18: 84
Total: 338
Like elsewhere around the country, CCC’s much touted
candidate selection process did not advertise itself well in Harare East, where
the selection outcome was clearly rigged in advance.
In the circumstances, the widely circulated picture of Hon
Markham’s labourers cum voters standing behind him, as their BOSS, in CCC’s
“vote by queuing behind your candidate” selection process in Harare East cut a
terrible optic, and there are no two ways about that Hon, say what you want to
say, but the image speaks for itself and what it says to any thinking and rational
person is awful and disgraceful!
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