By Own Correspondent| The MDC Alliance will on June 5 2018, march to President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s offices to demand for electoral reforms.
Speaking at a press conference at Morgan Tsvangirai House in Harare today (Friday), Tendai Biti who was standing in for the Alliance spokesperson Welshman Ncube said the protest was a peaceful demo which aimed at pushing President Mnangagwa to impliment electoral reforms ahead of the July 30 election.
“The MDC Alliance has thus resolved to mobilize its members in terms of
Section 59 of the Constitution to cause ZEC and the government to accede to our legitimate demands in the spirit of Constitutionalism, justice and most importantly, Zimbabwe.
The demonstration will take place on the 5th of June 2018,” Hon Tendai Biti, one of the Alliance Principal has said.
Hon Biti said that the people will march from the Africa Unity Square to the ZEC offices, then proceed to the Munhumutapa building and wind back to Africa Unity Square where they will be addressed by the Alliance leadership.
“Of concern to us is the absence of reforms to ensure a free, fair and credible election that will set the country on a sustainable path to recovery,” Hon Biti said
Among the issues highlighted in the MDC Alliance’s Peace document launched in March this year, the principals are demanding a clean voters’ roll in an analyzable and searchable format.
“We need a copy of the voter’s roll in its analyzable form,” he added.
Adding on, Hon Biti said there is an undeniable need for a voters’ roll audit by a credible audit firm in order to deal with all the fictitious and non-existent names that marred the previous election.
“We need an audit of the voters’ roll because the voter inspection
period between 19th and 29th of May had two processes.
There was a process of fresh registration of voters and a process of massive transfer of voters from one constituency to another. That means we need another inspection period before the election of 30 July.
“We need an external audit to do three things, establish the legitimacy of the people sitting in that voters’ roll.
The audit should establish the credibility of this voters roll vis a vis the 2013 voters’ roll. Our fear is that they have contaminated the 2018 voters’ roll with the corrupt voters’ roll that was used to steal the 2013 election.
Thirdly, we need the external audit to be married with the data in the Registrar general’s office, so that the register of birth and death must marry with the voters’ roll so that we do not have phantom voters in the voters’ roll,” he added.
The Alliance further highlighted that polling stations have been increased by 1 500.
“We are concerned about polling stations. ZEC has unilaterally increased polling stations to 11 500 from 10 000. This is illegitimate because when the voter registration exercise took place, it was polling station based.
When people went to register to vote, immediately a person was given a polling station from where they will cast their ballot on the 30th of July so to unilaterally establish more stations is detrimental to the voter and prejudicial to the system as it is opaque, its illegal and meant to frustrate the efforts for the holding of free, fair and credible elections in Zimbabwe,”