Late on Saturday afternoon – after another long day of waiting for election results – the power went off. To be accurate, I was working through the last batch of Senate results released by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (the zzzzzzzzzz.. elections, what elections?, commission) when the lights went out.

Normally power cuts in Zimbabwe are so common that they’re quite unremarkable. But this time, I was more concerned than usual. Why?

Well, true to their word, the Zimbabwe government managed to secure additional power supplies from some gullible nation (Mozambique I believe) to keep the lights on whilst the nation voted in the harmonized elections held on March 29, 2008. Since then the power had stayed on – maybe to make sure there was no hitch in the counting of the votes (ha,ha!). Seems like the ZEC has been blinded by the light because 8 days later they still haven’t announced the result of the presidential election.

Anyway, when the power went out on Saturday night I thought, “Oh no, ZEC has rigged the final result and announced Mugabe as the winner”. Lights out Zimbabwe. Or for those of us from a previous era – Tilt! Game Over.

I got into line to vote fairly early this morning. Anyone who knows me will tell you it’s no mean feat to get me anywhere on time – never mind early! That shows you how seriously I’m taking voting this year. In line by 6.20 am.

I know that Mugabe’s more unpopular than ever this election and yet still he holds so many of the trump cards: police and soldiers forced to vote in the presence of their commanding officers; free advertising on state media; presidential appointees running everything associated with the elections – constituency boundaries, location of polling stations, the voters’ roll itself.

So, I knew it was important to make sure I cast my own vote – no rigging leeway afforded the Zimbabwean regime by me staying away.

I think we must have been at a ‘model’ polling station – Courtney Selous School in Greendale, Harare – because there was media galore there. Media vans trailing cables and equipment parked along the road outside the school. A variety of journalists walking up and down the queues asking earnest questions and filming ‘democracy’ in progress. I can only hope that they moved on to a less ‘model’ polling station to film the real action!

I couldn’t fault the process at all. Timely, orderly, polite (if you don’t count the glaring somebodies who stood in a silent, evenly spaced row, watching the queue of voters intently).

We would’ve made good TV. Rainbow nation – laughing and chatting together as we slowly but surely moved forward in our orderly queues into the voting station. The subtext in reality is that most people were going through the motions of voting for change – with very little real expectation that we could overwhelm Mugabe’s rigging machine. That would take a huge turnout and a unified opposition to achieve.

After I left the polling station with my partner, we travelled around the area to see how other polling stations were doing. All we could see were short queues everywhere – where were all the voters? Living in the rural areas post-Murambatsvina? Or part of the displaced in the Diaspora? Or disenfranchised through obstructive officialdom working for Tobias Mudede, the Registrar-General?

At one point we stopped on the side of the road to take photos of the graffiti and posters on walls and lamp posts. A young man standing nearby thought we were covertly filming someone. Rather officiously he called out to us asking whether we had sought the people’s permission to film them. Since there was no-one in frame we asked him what he meant.

He was unexpectedly hostile and clearly thought we were foreign, asking us where we were from. After a bit of a chat across the 10 meters of tangled bush that separated us, he came down to the road to talk to us. To prove to him that I was indeed local I showed him the little finger on my left hand – newly pinked by voting ink. His attitude changed in a flash. He started to talk animatedly about change and was very proud about the graffiti’d Zanu PF posters on the walls nearby. I asked him if he had voted yet, and from his reply got a strong sense that he wasn’t registered to vote. Impotent in electoral terms – his site of struggle is restricted to the battle of posters on the city’s walls.

To set the scene:

On 19th February 2008, members of the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) were engaged in a peaceful “Save our Education” campaign in the streets of Harare. When they approached the 4th Street bus terminus they were apprehended by, as yet unidentified, youths from the ZANU (PF) building. The 9 teachers were taken inside the building and subjected to all manner of brutalization including but not limited to assaults with clenched feet, open palms, booted feet and assaults with iron rods. Female teachers among the victims were subjected to verbal abuse of the most degrading and inhuman nature. One female teacher was stripped naked in full view of her male colleagues and assailants alike and had her genital area repeatedly trampled upon (read more from Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights).

These violent youths, themselves victims of the crumbling education system, are amongst those who shake their heads and bemoan the state of things in Zimbabwe. It won’t be long before they join the trek south, looking for the very future that the people who they are assaulting are campaigning for.

Their duplicity, and their stupidity makes me furious.

It takes enormous courage for individuals to go out in public in Zimbabwe and campaign for their rights and the rights of others. The PTUZ’s sustained efforts to bring positive change to the education sector are all the more amazing considering the punitive environment in which they have to campaign.

And, given the callous and cruel behaviour of the police in response to this incident, it is difficult to differentiate between the police and the thugs.

The Police took all the victims to Harare central police station and laid them along an office corridor at CID Law & Order Section where they were still lying and writhing in visible pain at the time lawyers deployed to attend to them eventually found them at around 1400hrs. Lawyers were initially denied access by the officer in charge of CID Law & Order Section Harare Central Police Station namely; one Detective Chief Inspector Manjengwa. One lawyer was forcibly escorted from the victims as he tried to do a physical count of them and hand-over medication to one of the victims Mr. Raymond Majongwe. Offers to ferry the victims to a hospital were turned down by the police.

If you share our outrage at this blatant disregard for the teachers’ right to raise awareness about the plight of education in Zimbabwe, please write in solidarity to:

• Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe
  P.O. Box CR 620, Cranborne, Harare, Zimbabwe

And in protest to:

• Commissioner of Police
  Augustine Chihuri
  Zimbabwe Republic Police
  P.O.Box CY34, Causeway, Zimbabwe
  Tel: +263-4-250008
  Fax: +263-4-792621

• The Officer Commanding Harare Central Police Station
  PO Box CY 154
  Causeway
  Harare
  Zimbabwe
  Telephone+263-4-733033

• The Ministry of Justice
  Post Bag 7704
  Causeway
  Harare
  Zimbabwe
  Telephone +263-4-774620-7

• The President’s Office
  Post Bag 7700
  Causeway
  Harare
  Zimbabwe
  Telephone: +263-4-707091
  Fax: +263-4-708540

• Your local Member of Parliament

Please make a point of raising awareness of this issue in your social circles.

This tired election – so dishonestly called the 2008 ‘harmonised’ elections – is suddenly the source of great interest and speculation. Just 4 weeks ago it was a dead in the water, one horse race. Mugabe versus the masses. Results already printed, factotums paid in advance for services to be rendered.

Apathy looked likely to be the real winner and then along came Simba. And suddenly everyone in the cities wanted to be registered to vote.

What makes Simba Makoni such an obvious choice for the urban voter? The easy answer is this: he’s neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai. Fine, it’s clear then who he isn’t – but isn’t it time we voted FOR something rather than against something? I don’t want to vote NO. I want to vote YES. And Simba has a lot of explaining to do before election day on March 29. Voting blindly is not an option. I’d rather spoil my ballot.

Now here’s the thing. How do we do anything positive around this election? The candidates we have to choose from are either dangerous to our health (Mugabe), stale (Tsvangirai), not transparent (Simba), self-serving (most of the rest), fabulous (too few to count) or unknown (way too many).

From my experience, the only time a politician will give you the time of day is in the weeks before the election. So fellow Zimbabweans – this is our moment. Insist that you will NOT vote for a candidate unless they:

• speak at a venue near you
• answer your questions
• have a positive vision for the future
• can practically implement a majority of the promises they make
• believe in women’s advancement

This is OUR time. Make them work for our votes.

This morning I attended a seminar organised by a local business specialising in accounting software. The NGO oriented audience was hoping for tools that would make accounting in multiple currencies in a hyper-inflationary environment easier. The fact that the Zimbabwe dollar loses value every couple of hours means that we’re looking for specialised solutions!

Under normal circumstances it makes sense for software companies to offer variations of their software to cater for the differing needs of small, medium and large organisations. But as the presentation proceeded it became clear that everyone in the audience needed the flexible, “advanced” features normally packaged and priced for large organisations. The hefty price tag meant that for many of the smaller organisations it would be back to the office to their spreadsheets and individual ingenuity.

At the tea break I observed another telling reality. In the past we’ve normally queued to fetch a cup of tea or coffee then gone on to add a biscuit or slice of cake to our saucer. This morning most people headed straight for the food – then lined up patiently to wash it down with something hot later.

I’ve spent a couple of days this week at the Highway Africa Conference in Grahamstown, South Africa in the company of journalists encompassing old and new media, some formally trained, many untrained – bloggers, vloggers, editors and so on.

Not infrequently Zimbabwe was used as the extreme example of a place where things don’t work, of state interference in the media, of a people abused. And if not referenced in that manner, we were the brunt of the joke.

Notably none of these references mocked or denigrated Zimbabwe’s journalists. That in itself is informative – as if you don’t kick a people when they’re on their knees. For certainly Zimbabwean journalists, formally trained and amateur bloggers alike are deserving of constructive criticism. Exaggeration, opinion, slander, conjecture, rumour mongering and propaganda are frequently offered up as news and information. Partisan polarization has left little middle ground.

The increasing use of anonymity by Zimbabwe’s writers to protect the identity of the commentator is a worryingly negative trend. Some might say that this as a measure of our dictator’s influence. I suggest that it is a measure of our lack of commitment to stand up for what is rightfully ours – the right to communicate.