Last week I went to a Regional Round table Discussion on Elections and Governance organised by ZESN the Zimbabwe Election Support Network. It was both humbling and inspiring to listen to civil society actors from all over the region share some of their experiences with democracy, governance and elections. They were familiar with issues in Zimbabwe, and empathetic to them. Listening to speakers from Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, I was reminded that Zimbabwe is not the first to face human rights abuses, flawed constitutions, ignored judiciaries, and livelihoods trampled over for the sake of power and personal or party advancement.

One thing that stuck out quite a lot for me was the extent to which the range of speakers repeated the refrain that democracy is a process, and that while elections are important they are only one part of what makes up democracy. Other things like respect for human rights, access to information, economic stability, access to health care and education, gender equality, an environment free of violence and intimidation, electoral laws and legal systems that make free and fair elections possible are also fundamental to democracy.

It was clear that so many people in the room are eager for elections in Zimbabwe to be held in 2008 – and not postponed until 2010 as has been rumoured and debated by some. But March 2008 is just a year away, and I know there is so much work to be done between now and then. A new constitution, a transitional government, international supervision, all of this and more would need to happen if the next elections are to have any chance of truly representing the people’s will, instead of being one more rigged election which legitimises a hollow charade of democracy.

You can read a summary of the ZESN meeting with audio files on the Kubatana site. ZESN has published the recommendations from the meeting as well as some of the papers which were presented (see the list below).

This entry was posted on March 21st, 2007 at 8:10 am by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.