BELOW is a part of MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s speech at the party’s 14th anniversary celebrations explaining how the July 31 elections were “stolen”.
Those who stole this election claim to have been overwhelmingly voted in by the people, even here in Manicaland where we know you have since declared this province shall never be Zanu PF again.
They made a farce of our electoral petition where we intended to expose how this election was stolen. But I want to say that we had to withdraw the presidential election petition because we were denied election material and figures. They refused to allow us to bring witnesses to testify.
We have teachers, school heads and other civil servants who wanted to testify on how they were asked to plead illiteracy.
We wanted to bring in many witness and cross-examine Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede and the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission chief (Justice) Rita Makarau, among others.
We wanted Mudede to explain many things, including the millions of dollars he paid Nikuv without the knowledge of the Finance minister and what national services the company had offered the people of Zimbabwe.
We have sat as a national leadership and received reports from across the country on how these thieves did it and we have frightening information, most of it from some of the players involved in the electoral theft.
This election was highly militarised. The militarisation started with the deployment of military personnel such as former Air Vice-Marshall Henry Muchena and several other former intelligence officials to work at the Zanu PF headquarters.
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We have a list of 10 senior military officers who were deployed as co-ordinators for the July 31 election in each of the provinces.
We now have impeccable information that 35 000 youths were trained and deployed specifically in Harare, all Matabeleland provinces and in Manicaland after Zanu PF said the people in these provinces were “resisting reorientation programmes run by civilians”.
Inkomo Barracks in Harare had 7 343 recruits who went through training and were deployed three days ahead of the election.
Named intelligence and military intelligence department officials were working with Nikuv to manipulate the voters’ roll in both rural and urban areas.
We now know who stole how many carats, on what date, who took them to the intermediary in Angola and how much was paid as the regime mopped national resources to fund electoral theft.
We now know which countries, which individuals and companies were at the centre of this electoral theft. I now have the dossier with me, which I will be sharing with heads of State in Sadc and the rest of Africa.
Six weeks after the election, we still do not have a copy of the voters’ roll. We now have information that there was a deliberate ploy to prevent registration for a certain age group and people from perceived MDC strongholds.
For example, during the initial voter registration period, Mashonaland East, a perceived Zanu PF stronghold, had 18 mobile registration teams while Harare had only five.
As a result, Harare had only 27 000 newly registered voters after the intense 30-day registration exercise while Mashonaland East had more than 50 000.
