With just 15 days to go until Zimbabwe’s harmonised election 31 July, Kubatana subscribers are sharing their on-the-ground observations and citizen reports. In the words of our subscribers:

Chiredzi North Zanu PF winner for MP primary elections yesterday failed to campaign since he gave everything to women at Buffalo Range. Nothing was given to any male attender there.

Please tell Elliot Pfebve to be serious if the party is to win Bindura North. We haven’t seen him while Zanu PF is busy campaigning. Is he still in UK? Please Pfebve prove that you a strong man.

At the MDC-T rallies, the MDC-T leader should take advantage to counter the utterances by ZANU PF to resuscitate the Zim-dollar currency. The Zim-dollar era still brings sad memories of the hard times we underwent through eg inflation, queues for anything everywhere, shortages of goods, cash,etc. The MDC-T should also be careful to handle the question of devolution of power esp in Matebeleland so as to counter utterances by the Ncube/Dabengwa coalition.

I’m in Mufakose. We are being forced to attend Zanu PF rallies and to know who to vote for.

if the rig we do not want to let them do what they want.if they want to kill,they are going to kill everyone.we are going to street as much as every zimbabwean to oust these frogs.change will rule and this is the time.kana vachifunga kuti vacharambirapo regai mazuva akwane varavire zvatakavagadzirira.tirikunopinda mustate house next month masikati.toita zvekumubvisa isisu povho.hakuna mupuriss kana musoja anokwanisa kucontrolla.it will be unstopable.takatsamwa kudarika ivo.tell every mdct suppoter out there kuti ngatisimuke kana vafunga kupenga tichapenga kuvadarika.kana vachifunga kuti vakapenga regai tivaratidze kunonzi kupenga.tazotsamwa manje.tell everyone that revolution is coming.togeyher we will remove mugabe and his thieves. we are tired of this noncense

Aspiring candidate for Wedza North constituency Engineer Musanhi with his Toyota Hilux is seen mobilising some youths to go and attend and listen the  octagenerian leader who is around the country to lure people to vote for him.But not many are willing to attend bt i can see that maybe in the long run many are going to be forced in a bid to break the record made by the long rival of Mugabe,the Premier Morgan Richard Tsvangirai during the launch of the Party Manifesto in the same town.

I wonder if the Sadac Observers have noted it that many Mdc-T posters in Wedza Centre have been all torn,ask them what they think about that.Is there any fair ground to these elections.Im saying things that even a blind man can see.

The chaos of special voting for Zimbabwe’s 31 July harmonised election continued yesterday, and even into this morning.

Updates from Nehanda Radio suggested voting stretching into the early hours of this morning in some locations, due to delays in the opening of polling stations because voting materials came late.

• 16 July – 01:20 “Still at the polling station at Gweru D.A. only 333 ballots came to add to yesterday’s 107 out of 1700, now cops were threatening to lock in polling officers and were turning rowdy and the district commanding officer had to be called. Polling agents and election officers are just sitting inside awaiting further instructions from ZEC. I think today its Pungwe.” ‪#‎NehandaCitizenReports‬

• 16 July -  01:07 “At Rusununguko Polling station, only 13 were able to cast their votes. 2 regular police details and 2 constabulary members. As I am talking now we are in the ZUPCO bus no ballot papers until now. Female police members crying foul and promised not 2 return 2morrow. A ZANU-PF MP Mr Matangaidze for Shurugwi south intended to give food to the police officers @ around 0100hours but they refused. Ndizvowo here izvi!” ‪#‎NehandaCitizenReports‬

Feedback from our SMS subscribers told a similar story, for example:

• 16 July – 9am – My brother managed to vote this morning at Mabvuku Hall, Harare East
• 15 July – 8:30pm – Voting is too slow in Bindura. At Kambira polling station only 3 people have voted. Most ovters have never seen their envelopes. ZEC is just weak. People are seeing it as a way of delaying voters.
• 15 July – 6pm – Voting yet to start at Mberengwa East polling station.

It’s illegal to place bets on the outcome of the election. But anyone willing to place bets on whether the special voting chaos influences the AU summit on Friday – and gets them to push for a postponement of the election?

The latest episode of the farce which is Zimbabwe’s 31 July election aired this weekend. 14-15 July were the designated dates for “special voting,” in which members of the police and armed forces, who will be on duty on election day and thus unable to go to their regular polling station to vote, are given an opportunity to vote.

As a tweet from @SirNige aptly summed it up, “The special vote currently taking place in Zimbabwe is definitely very special #ZimElections.”

Ever since the Constitution Court said Zimbabwe’s Harmonised Election was to be held as soon as possible, and should be before 31 July, Zimbabwe’s election – which was never going to be without its eyebrow raising moments – has reached new lows.

The fact that the president’s proclamation of the election date was announced and scheduled in an illegal and unconstitutional manner was conveniently swept under the carpet when the same Constitutional Court postponed arguments against the election date, and then waited until after Nomination Court had sat to dismiss the cases.

Add to that, the Constitutionally mandated ward-based mobile voter registration process was reduced to a district-based process, with the government claiming it didn’t have sufficient funds to follow the directive of its own constitution. The voters’ roll coming out of this process is equally problematic, with the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN) noting serious irregularities with the voters’ roll, particularly the under-registration of urban and young voters. This is consistent with criticisms from organisations like the Combined Harare Residents Association (CHRA), Election Resource Centre (ERC) and Youth Forum on the mobile voter registration exercise.

Meanwhile, a court case on the weekend’s special voting process was meant to be heard today – but was postponed until Wednesday, rendering the court case largely academic as Nehanda Radio points out, since special voting is scheduled to be wrapped up by then.

A 31 July election date meant that special voting had to be held no later than this weekend. As human rights lawyer @tzhuwarara helpfully explained via Twitter, “In terms of Sec 81A(1)(a) of Zim electoral law ZEC MUST set two days only 4 special vote, the last day hz 2 b at least 16 days frm Jul 31.”

But this special voting – which many thought would be a non-event, with police officers lining up to vote as their commanding officers instructed them to – has proved a farce. According to the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, many polling stations around the country received material late yesterday, or even today, compromising the polling at these locations. ZESN also noted that some polling stations in Harare were using informal hand-written lists of voters.

These irregularities highlight the inability of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to prepare the necessary logistics for the special vote. But from the beginning, Zimbabwe’s 31 July election has been compromised. It might not be marred by the violence witnessed in 2008, or even experience the types of human rights violations the RFK Centre and Amnesty International note it is vulnerable to.

Napoleon allegedly once said “never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.” Whether through malice or incompetence, Zimbabwe’s 2013 election has been subjected to an illegal process and unprocedural time frame which undermine the legitimacy of this election, and thus the country’s prospects of democratic governance.

My vision of transition in Zimbabwe all along has been following a model and blueprint of anger and retaliation by the masses like what we noticed in Libya. This however clashed with my utopia of a Gotham Zimbabwe where people could live in harmony within their communities and where the governor respects the governed.

After pondering upon the story within the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe, I also saw my wish being quashed to favour a more Zimbabwean like and dignified but yet painful way (to our adversaries) of making political transition in Zimbabwe.

I felt so touched and at the same time jubilant by the events in the Anglican saga in Zimbabwe. From that moment in December 2012 when Bishop Chad Gandiya held a cleansing ceremony of the cathedral, I have always felt that the same demon that had manifested itself in the church is the same, although with additional tricks, with the one that is currently besieging the political side of our country.

For a new era to be officially declared in Zimbabwe, incense should burn in exactly the same way that happened at Harare cathedral to exorcise a demon and scourge of repression and corruption that had manifested itself in our politicians and held the whole country to ransom for far too long. The overwhelming majority of Zimbabweans are Christians therefore I feel that it will be the right call for the whole nation to come together in unity to pray and cleanse our nation of this decade long totalitarianising evil by a gang of greedy kleptomaniacs.

Romans 12v20-21 clearly teaches us that, “Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”

It’s always fascinating trying to understand why people choose to vote for a particular party, and as the political rallies hot up with Mugabe scaling down his itinerary, political party colours have become vogue, never mind that some wear these T-shirts emblazoned with party leader effigies for reasons that have nothing to do with political affiliation but everything to do with the area they find themselves in.

But it is another thing altogether to get convincing responses concerning how one arrives at choosing the political party to support.

I sat with two young men over the weekend who were preparing to go to an MDC-T rally somewhere in the capital.

They proudly wore the party colours and were literally fired up for the occasion. Opposite them sat another young man who wore a Zanu PF cap that bears the image of Robert Mugabe.

And then the two young men felt compelled to pour out to me why they were so passionate about the party they had chosen to support.

I was told one was a pharmacist, while the other said he had done some management degree at the University of Zimbabwe.

“Look at me my brother, I am wearing my younger brother’s jeans because he has more money than me but I am more educated than him,” one of them with the UZ education said. I looked at him and indeed the pair of jeans was that kind of tight fit with “borrowed” written all over them!

“For me, the MDC-T is the only party that might give me a chance to get the job I trained for. Look at this guy, he is a pharmacist but works at a supermarket,” he said referring to his colleague.

And the colleague went into a long tirade about his circumstances, why he felt Zanu PF had outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any.

These were two angry young men for whom the future of the country rests in new ideas that will spring them from their misery despite all the education they boast.

The other chap wearing the Zanu PF cap seemed amused and had no input whatsoever, but then it turns out these are chaps from the same neighbourhood for whom tolerance of divergent political views perhaps comes naturally.

As we sat, along came this other guy who told a third older man that there was a Zanu PF rally across the road, “why don’t you come along?”

The older man responded, “look who I am sitting with,” pointing at the red T-shirts the young men were wearing. “You should join us instead. Why are you going to the Zanu PF rally in the first place?”

I saw the chap blush and he responded: “Ah, ndinongondzwa chiyifarira.”

And that was the end of it.

It got me thinking about all the manifestos that the parties have put out, if at all the ordinary party supporters actually read through them to decide their vote, yet some of the issues that came out from encounters with these young folks were based on the pragmatic, such as the demand for jobs by these two “educated” lads.

That’s why many find it laughable that a party that has been in power for 33 years can today talk about unlocking a USD2 trillion economy.

These become nothing but wild numbers that the new crop of young voters will interrogate and when a guy like Kasukuwere says “we are emancipating our people,” the younger voters laugh and dismiss him as a fraud.

Yet, as everything during elections, politicians will say all sorts of nonsense to woo voters, and what this country certainly needs right now are enlightened voters. But then a corollary of that would be, are there any enlightened political parties?

/It is always sad to come face to face with young people who choose to own other people’s anger and vindictiveness without interrogating the implications of their choices and actions and where such behavior affects the way we are governed and the future of democracy in our country. From Grace Mutandwa’s memoirs, The Power and the Glory/.

The tantrums of First Ladies are actually an indication of gender powerlessness. They  have no record of their own, no power of their own, they are just there because their husbands are up there. Many try to convert executive idleness into a full time job by intruding into all kinds of public spaces to remind us that they are there. That’s why some of them assume they are leaders of other women  in a kind of delusionary division of labour with their husbands who command the whole country. They are paranoid around female members of the government. – From a 2004 installment by the late Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem.