A very useful perspective on the importance of voter registration – something that the MDC failed to take seriously:

MT, his leadership and 1 million people (an estimate but more later) are accountable to the nation for the trouncing by Zanu PF.

Prior to 2008, and over the last 5 years, fringe advisers to MT and his team have been telling him that this battle is about registered voters. But this advice was never taken seriously. My estimation (by taking many many small “straw polls”) has been that 30% of MDC supporters are not registered to vote – not for any draconian legislation but just because it is not easy, they are lazy and their leaders are not imploring them to register.

In the last few days I have increased my estimation. I am staggered by how many people are not registered. A 40-year old lawyer who had a beer group on a Friday evening of six mates – he is the only one registered. A father of senior school kids was wringing his hands today saying “now my kids will never get jobs” but he is not registered and therefore did not vote – for his kids! In a small NGO of 20 people 5 are not registered.

MT and his team have been told that voter registration should be on top of the agenda with SADC during the GNU days. That an extended mobile registration exercise should have taken place last year or even the year before (without the emotions of an election in sight) with SADC observing the process. This exercise should have been treated as more important than election day.

The MDC set up “voters clubs” through their ineffective structures and thought this was “job done”. Crazy, crazy, crazy. How is it possible that MT, Biti and others did not take voter registration seriously – they had 5 years to do it?

This did not escape Mugabe and his advisers. They would have seen the discrepancies between the census figures and the ward voters roll and licked their wrinkled lips. They have always had a “fast track” registration system for their supporters (and those people that the local leaders knew they could cower into voting).

Mugabe held a mockery of a voter a registration exercise just before these elections so the Observers could tick that box. But the process was deliberately slow (as we all knew it would be) and deliberately poorly advertised (as we all knew it would be). In any case it was too late to register the massive number that needed to be registered (and they knew this).

So in a nutshell MT has gone headlong into political suicide (and taken the nation with him) with 1 million of his supporters unable to vote. He had 5 years to address this. We will soon find out, when the numbers of this election come out, what a meaningful % this 1 million will be. Meanwhile MDC wring their hands and cry foul. They mislead their followers that Mugabe stole the election reinforcing the “learned helplessness – my vote does not count!”  This is highly irresponsible. He and his top team need to admit their basic, strategic blunder and they must make way for new leadership.

For sure Zanu PF got up to tricks but the voter registration battle had the overwhelming impact.

But Zimbabweans are stunned and talking, erroneously,  about the magic of the Zanu PF’s rigging machinery. Zanu PF did not have to!

This entry was posted on August 6th, 2013 at 2:20 pm by Bev Clark and is filed under Elections 2013, Uncategorized, Zimbabwe Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.