By Wilbert Mukori- “HARARE Thursday recorded its first COVID-19 recovery after four patients on treatment and isolation tested negative of the virus, bringing the national figure of recoveries to nine, the Health Ministry announced Friday morning,” reported a local publication.

So, the ministry has carried out the usual 1 000 or so tests on suspected covid-19 cases including a number returnees in isolation centres, those with covid-19 like symptoms and the four above. The results were all negative!

But why is the government not telling us how many tests were carried out, where, on what group of people, etc. For the last eight days now government has pointedly refused to give any details on the tests carried out – assuming it is still testing! What is there to hid? Hiding information is something of Zanu PF mastery.

In the July 2018 elections ZEC claimed that Mnangagwa won the elections. Everyone else who observed the elections dismissed the whole process as a farce.

“The final results as announced by the Electoral Commission contained numerous errors and lacked adequate traceability, transparency and verifiability,” the EU Election Observer Mission final report stated.

Just to prove the point, ZEC’s own affidavit in the Constitutional Court gave three different vote tallies for Mnangagwa and admitted it did not have all the V11 forms, the summary of vote count in each of the over 11 000 Polling Stations and hence the different totals. So even ZEC could not verify and trace where its figures came from!

“As such, many aspects of the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe failed to meet international standards,” concluded the EU report.

Rigging the July 2018 elections has been a disaster for the nation because it confirmed Zimbabwe was still a pariah state ruled by corrupt, incompetent and vote rigging thugs; just as it was under Mugabe. The investors and lenders, tired of dealing with pariah states, continued to shy away.

The price for rigging the covid-19 data is that the virus will continue to spread. 

Indeed, the spread will be even faster and wider because people who would otherwise take extra precautions such as washing hands, wearing PPE, etc. around a covid-19 infected person will not do so because they did not know. So many, many more people will be infected with the virus, hundreds of thousands will suffer and will die!