Zimbabwe is abuzz with talk of elections and the referendum. It seems the electorate will have a very busy year ahead of them. I must confess that I don’t count myself among the electorate; I’ve never registered to vote.

I imagine I’m not the only youth aged 18 to 35 who hasn’t registered to vote. Neither am I the only one who isn’t remotely inclined. Answer me this MKD, ZAPU, ZANU PF and MDC-whoever, why should I bother to vote?

Voting is supposed to be part of a democratic process where, after much consideration of the available candidates, a citizen may choose one whom he or she feels most addresses their issues. But after much consideration of the candidates available to me, frankly, I’d rather not participate. I do want change; I do want to be a part of something greater than myself. I have high hopes for Zimbabwe, but I find that these hopes are often choked by the reality of my day-to-day existence.

Everyday I am confronted by a kind of lawlessness. >From the Kombi drivers, who know no rules, to businessmen who shamelessly ransom basic necessities citing mythological taxes. And what are my City Councillor and Member of Parliament, who promised me a return to the Sunshine City in the Bread Basket of Africa doing about this? Nothing. When I read about ministers who unashamedly steal in broad daylight, and get away with it, it begins to make sense, none of these people care about me, or this country.

Once when I was younger, and caught up in an idealistic fervour I did believe that I could make a difference. That my vote was my right, and that my government was accountable to me and anyone else who answered to mwanawevhu. I am wiser now. Promises are made, and when the dust has settled, and the slogan charged rallies have ended they are forgotten.

I’m sure the people who cast their ballots in 2005 were full of hope that an election would bring water to their houses, doctors to their clinics, cheaper food into the shops and teachers back to their children’s schools. It didn’t. In 2008 they were beaten for taking the trouble, and their situation became worse. Why then would I want to participate in a process that legitimises the illegitimate, gives power to those without conscience and seems to only bring pain and suffering?

I am young, but I am no longer idealistic. I watched with envy Obama’s election campaign, as scores of young peopled chanted ‘yes we can’ marching in the streets on TV. They felt a sense of ownership of their country that I did once. I know better now. This is Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and should he ever win, it will become Morgan’s Zimbabwe, but it will never be mine.

An excerpt from a report by the Harare Residents Trust:

Burial fees

The residents argued that if the government of Zimbabwe made land available for free under the land reform program then why should a dead corpse be made to buy land from the City of Harare?

The Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network launched an observation report on the voters roll. In April 2010, ZESN undertook an audit to assess the quality of Zimbabwe’s Voter’s Roll. The research project sought to test the accuracy and completeness of the voter’s roll and to make recommendations for a cleanup of the voters roll.

In his remarks during the launch, Chairperson of the Zimbabwe Electoral Support Network Tinoziva Bere said:

The people of this country and everybody concerned about the Voter’s Roll ought to have access to it, freely and easily. And any exercise in improving it or cleaning it, ought to be done publicly.

Observation of the Voter’s Roll was conducted using three tests: a computer test, a list to people field test and a people to list test. A systematic analysis of data obtained from these tests provides critical information about the quality of the voters than can inform efforts to improve the voter registration in Zimbabwe. Among the findings in the report were the following;

-    The list to people test revealed that 41% of registered voters were no longer residing at the address on the voter’s roll.
-    97% of respondents have not transferred to reflect the change in residential address against the 3% who had transferred to new wards.
-    More males (52%) were registered compared to females, who constituted 48% of the registered population. Population statistics for Zimbabwe indicate that women constitute 52% of the population. -    The computer test shows that only 18% of those registered to vote are youths aged between 18 and 30.

Among the recommendations ZESN makes to government and the Zimbabwe Electoral commission are the following:

-    Increase the transparency of the voter registration process such as deletion from the voter’s roll as the process is currently out of public scrutiny and the criteria for deletion is left to the Constituency Registrars
-    Voter education drives to inform citizens on the procedures for registration, transferring, objections, making claims and deletion of dead voters
-    Continuous maintenance of the Voter’s Roll is important to ensure that voters that have become ineligible to vote, for example by death, are removed in order to prevent over inflating the voter’s roll -    Voter registration must in it’s entirety be integrated into one office of ZEC and ZEC should have total control of voter registration and maintenance of the voter’s roll to ensure greater accountability for it’s state
-    Prioritise young people in the issuance of the national identity card to increase the numbers of young people who register as voters

In closing the launch, Jestina Mukoko of the Zimbabwe Peace Project said:

“I hope the media will note that ZESN has opted not to refer to the voter’s roll as being in a shambles but that they want to critically look at the various issues.”

I’m so wishing I was young enough to do this:

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I am very happily proven wrong about the Zimbabwe Republic Police and their responsiveness to an attempted take over of Kuimba Shiri and Lavon Bird Gardens at Lake Chivero this weekend. This morning, I claimed that the police did nothing, but according to article by AFP this afternoon,

Zimbabwean police drove out scores of so-called war veterans and supporters of President Robert Mugabe after they declared themselves new owners of several tourist resorts, a minister and media reports said Monday. The seizures on Saturday near Lake Chivero, west of the capital Harare, were ostensibly part of Mugabe’s land reforms, launched in 2000 in what he described as a bid to correct ownership imbalances in the former British colony. But Minister of State Jameson Timba said the latest confiscations were illegal and he had called in police to put a stop to them after he received pleas from the businesses’ owners. “They were moved out yesterday by riot police,” Timba, a member of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which is in a power-sharing government with Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, told AFP. “There were about 200 of them. Fortunately there was no damage to property.” Police could not be reached for comment.

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This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. He was only 35 when he died, but in his comparatively short life, he managed not simply to help what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo gain independence from Belgium, but he inspired an idea.

Lumumba’s political career was not very long. He was Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo for almost three months before he was deposed in a coup during the Congo Crisis, and then murdered. The exact details surrounding his death are not clear, but the Belgian government and the CIA were implicated. In 2002 the Belgian government formally apologised to the Congolese people for Lumumba’s murder.

Lumumba is an African icon because he stood steadfast in his belief that the African people had a right to determine their destiny without interference. At Congo’s Independence, the Belgian monarch made it clear in his remarks that he expected Belgium to play a leading role in the Congo’s future, and Lumumba stood defiant in the face of Imperialism:

‘No Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that it is by struggle that we have won [our independence], a struggle waged each and every day, a passionate idealistic struggle, a struggle in which no effort, privation, suffering, or drop of our blood was spared. We will count not only on our enormous strength and immense riches but on the assistance of numerous foreign countries whose collaboration we will accept if it is offered freely and with no attempt to impose on us an alien culture of no matter what nature’.

Lumumba understood then that while Congo, as did other African countries subsequent to that, had achieved political independence, it was yet to gain economic freedom. It was because he was a threat to colonial interests that sought to maintain their economic relationship with postcolonial African countries that Lumumba was enough of a threat to be assassinated. More than anything Lumumba struggled against “an institutionalised relationship between Africans and Europeans,” in all it’s forms, which facilitated the exploitation of Africans and their resources. As he did then Lumumba represents the idea of unencumbered self-determination, the idea that Africans can truly be free.

In an article titled Lumumba’s ideals and the symbolism of his life, Lyn Ossome writes:

Today due to greed powered by its own African neighbours, who under the watchful eye of the United Nations continue to fuel ethnic conflicts and amass far too many civilian casualties, the country lies in political, economic and social tatters. The paranoid miscalculations of the U.S. and its allies during the Cold War cost Africa many inspiring leaders and perpetuated conflict in a number of countries that have paid long and hard, among them Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, and the DRC. In Sudan, a long civilian war robbed Southern Sudan of its economic soul for more than two decades, and the semi-autonomous region that stands poised to secede from its northern counterpart today is one that is desperately clinging to the hope of Pan-African solidarity and visionary, steadfast leadership. At the contentious heart of its secession lies its enormous mineral wealth, caught within the same cross-hairs of imperialist interests and intervening African interests against which Lumumba struggled until his death.