The Zimbabwe Democracy Institute (ZDI) yesterday became the latest in a string of CSOs to launch an adverse report on the July 31 poll, highlighting the flaws that have bedeviled the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission’s preparations.

ZDI launched Electoral Battleground: Voters Roll Rigmarole, which I thought was a play on the rigging apparatus Zanu PF has already put in place!

And indeed it has been endless talk about the country’s preparedness, or lack thereof, to hold such an important national process, with Zanu PF’s insistence coming under scrutiny and wide speculation that the “revolutionary party” already has a poll outcome in its favour, and most disturbingly, in collusion with ZEC.

Yet ZDI insists on the vigilance of not only itself but other CSOs working for a better Zimbabwe.

But with Tobais Mudede fashioning himself as the sole custodian of the voters’ roll, the ZDI remains awake to the fact that this has become the arena where Zanu PF will cook the numbers to rig the poll.

And like many critics of these rushed elections, ZDI raises concerns of the flawed reading of the pre-election conditions which so far have seen little or no violence as a template to give these polls as clean bill of health.

The rigging machine has been re-fashioned, and only yesterday, a senior South African government official actually made reference to the violence-free atmosphere as reason not to condemn the poor preps plaguing the ZEC.

Among many issues the ZDI report raises is the disenfranchisement of millions by deliberate exclusion from the voter’s roll through the frustrating voter registration exercise, the role of the security apparatus where the report comments that “ZANU-PF and the military have proven to be inseparable” and also laments the arrest of human rights defenders and raids on CSOs.

These are concerns that have been raised before, and as the election beckons next Wednesday, all these remain unresolved, and the logical “therefore” is a poll that does not meet the benchmarks of normal practices.

Only today, we read from Patrick Chinamasa that poll funding had been secured from domestic resources, and we long thought it was finance Minister Tendai Biti’s mandate to make such an announcement!

But as Pedzisai Ruhanya, the ZDI director said, “We are not here to cause chaos; we are here to manage ZEC chaos.”

And one needs not be a clairvoyant to foresee mayhem on July 31.

Today’s Herald announces “Govt secures poll funding.” Given that elections are in less than a week, that’s lucky I suppose. The article says “domestic resources mobilised,” and mentions “US $ 85 million released.” Phew. I knew all that diamond money would come in handy someday.

Meanwhile, the late access to election funding is just one more way in which this election is a mess before we’ve even voted. And yet shockingly, the African Union looks and says “Nothing gives us any cause for concern.”

There are 5 days till Zimbabwe’s Harmonised Election on 31 July 2013. And Nothing gives any cause for concern? Not:

• The fact that the election date itself was set in an illegal manner
• The illegal way in which the electoral laws for this election were promulgated
• The atrocious state of Zimbabwe’s voters’ roll and the disenfranchisement of Zimbabweans that will result
• The mess that was made of the special voting for the police
• Continued media bias by Zimbabwe’s state television broadcaster
• The fact that political parties still don’t have access to the final voters’ roll as promised
• The fact that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission still hasn’t issued the final list of polling stations
• The fact that POTRAZ has ordered mobile phone carriers like Econet to not carry international bulk text messages for political reasons

With a list like this what is most of concern is that the African Union doesn’t see anything of concern. Is this the low standard we have for Zimbabwean elections, and African elections more generally. As long as the violence stays minimal and the intimidation low-grade, it will do.  Never mind how many laws you break or rights you trample on along the way, our African colleagues will just turn a blind eye so it can be deemed “credible enough.”

Get active!

If you have had political posters pasted on your wall or gate, and if you don’t want them there, stand up to the abuse of power and remove them. It is your right to do so. Don’t be intimidated.

You can also email the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) on: inquiry [at] zec [dot] gov [dot] zw and file a report.

You add, we multiply!

That Mugabe is a bully is now a historical fact, and the he brooks no criticism or censure from fellow African presidents is a fact that has made a spoof out of Nepad’s much vaunted African/Peer Review Mechanism.

And it’s even worse when African diplomats and presidents alike are very much awake to the fact that Mugabe can indeed tell them off despite all efforts to knock sense into his head.

This became apparent with the arrival of Nkosazana Zuma-Dlamini into the country where she said there was no guarantee that African Union Mission chairperson Olusegun Obasanjo was going to be allowed into Zimbabwe, “saying it depends on whether Government will allow him.”

“I think he will come. If he is allowed he will come. They allowed me to come, that is all I’m saying.”

Why go ahead with the goddamn charade then when it is already known that even African observers are not viewed too kindly, not by government but, by Zanu PF?

In recent months there has been a continent-wide spike in reports of the abduction, shooting, imprisonment and harassment of journalists during the course of their duties across Africa, and it raises serious questions about commitments all these countries ostensibly made when they appanded their names to the Windhoek Declaration, for example in ensuring the safety of journalists and freedom of the press.

From Burkina Faso, that notorious land infamously known for the 1998 gruesome killing and burning of journalist Norbet Zongo, to our neighbor Zambia where “ailing” Michael Sata is exhibiting Robert Mugabe’s hyper-sensitivity to criticism, to our very own where one journalist answered a knock at the door of his home only to be brutally assaulted by enigmatic characters who are still at large.

In the Gambia, government has moved to restrict internet freedom, while in Gabon, government shut down newspapers critical to the State, and one wonders why it is that while others are celebrating the promise of online platforms and privately owned newspapers as the present and future of freedom of information and unfettered news production, some behemoths imagine they will succeed in stopping a revolution whose time has come, to borrow a phrase.

And indeed Zimbabwean journalists have said they fear for their lives during these coming elections, with one senior journalist actually advising junior colleagues that they should move in packs wherever they are assigned as there is safety in numbers.

Such advice is indeed very useful, knowing the treatment journalists have received even outside election periods.

But numbers of people armed with pens and notebooks are no match to numbers armed with sjamboks and cudgels!

And many of the countries who have seen a rise in the harassment of journalists, are typically having elections this year or in 2014, and they are the same regimes that are keen to see the legitimating of their governments by other countries be it the AU, the same AU that has made commitments to press freedom, or international community, but still do everything in their power to invite adverse reports by literally giving the press a beating.

And then these people get someone commenting that Africa is a dangerous place to work as a journalist, yes, viewing the continent through that prism of it being one huge homogenous space, and scream exaggeration!

But then, not everything has to make sense. It is okay when it only suits the mandarins in charge of “regulating” media space, and one will recall the “promise” made by Mahoso that private TV players will be licenced in 2103, only to have the same people condemning the appearance of 1st TV. What tosh!

Reflecting on the treatment on journalists in Zimbabwe, I recalled an incident reported a few years ago where a reporter from a privately-owned newspaper was assaulted by war veterans or Zanu PF activists (but then what’s the difference?) while “colleagues” from the State media witnessed it with unbridled glee and wondered if there is any hope for Zimbabwe’s media landscape to be a safe working space from 31 July to and beyond, but then this ain’t no time for pessism.

Zimbabwe’s CSOs have over the past 13 years or more been saddled with the Herculean task of highlighting government excesses and brazen breaches of democratic processes.

The long road has however inevitably inspired cynics to question their (CSOs) relevance if not to continue getting funding and blowing the moolah because poverty weary Zimbabweans have rightly looked up CSOs to lead or even catalyse the birth of a new nation, and as this logic goes, if it has taken them forever despite all the money they splash, they must be getting it wrong somewhere!

It is unfortunate therefore that the quest, like that of Zimbabweans and political parties yearning for a fresh beginning after a virtual one-party domination of political space has dragged for so long, and like Tsvangirai’s own for whom his delayed anointing has only given “the masses” ample time to scrunitise him more closely and ultimately doubting his capacity and competence. Time is such an ass.

Along the long way however, like typical fanatics who double their efforts and lose sight of their goal, the CSOs find themselves in a quandary of what happens after July 31 in the much awaited event that Zanu PF becomes history.

That is one of many thought-provoking questions raised yesterday by McDonald Lewanika, Crisis Coalition Director at a Food for Thought session at the US Embassy Public Affairs Section.

Because the CSOs have for long been criticized by the former ruling party as “running dogs of imperialism” who have turned social activism virtually into a million dollar industry, how they shape Zimbabwe’s post-Mugabe discourse has become a legitimate point to ponder, and for Lewanika, the fact that CSOs have morphed from their original ideal as “speaking truth to power” to unwittingly becoming more driven by the perks that accrue from that activism, it is a reality that their relevance becomes compromised.

However, as Lewanika pointed out, the success of CSOs in their agenda to hold State actors accountable and champion democratic transitions can in fact lead to their decline, which can be imagined as a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.

And the same has been raised since the chaos began here concerning the media who stood vigilante in the “speak truth to power” discourse. What happens to them after Mugabe goes, and this is apparently asked in light of what is seen as skewed coverage that favours one political party.

One thing that Lewanika raised that made that self-criticism of a movement he is part of some kind of daring honesty was the issue of activists who have become no different from the State actors they criticize, for example telling Mugabe off for refusing to quit when the CSOs activists themselves are afflicted by the same delusions of seeing themselves as permanent faces of the revolution.

That some CSOs virtually have “life presidents” has been an irony lost to the anti-Mugabe crusaders and it cannot be dismissed that this has made their relevance questionable, what with characters like Jonathan Moyo ever on the ready with unsavory epithets.

As Lewanika put it, bureaucratisation has been the death of some CSOs because now the focus is on positions and the perks that come with those positions, and some activists could in fact be positioning themselves for co-option into the “new MDC-T government” after July 31!

But that can never be reason to change generals during the war, as Lewanika put it!

The struggle continues and July 31 high noon beckons.