August 6 2013 at 08:03am
By Sam Ditshego Comment on
this story
REUTERSZimbabwe s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai will go to court to
challenge an election victory by President Robert Mugabe s Zanu-PF party, which
the Movement for Democratic Change rejects as fraudulent.Related
StoriesZimbabwe now back to square oneMugabe’s free but unfair winWe have been
fighting Mugabe aloneZim’s future rests on observers’ shoulders People who rig
their own votes should not be aiming ballot box brickbats at Zimbabwe, says Sam
Ditshego. Johannesburg - The local and international media were replete with
stories of President Robert Mugabe rigging elections. They have even
personalised the whole thing. They do not refer to Zanu-PF – they say or write
Mugabe this, Mugabe that. They do not even say or write “President” or Mr
Mugabe. They did the same with the executed former Iraqi leader, Saddam
Hussein. They no longer referred to the political party he led, the Ba’ath
Party. I doubt if some of the journalists, commentators and analysts knew the
name of his party. Let me share part of a study conducted on opposition parties
in Africa. The study says there are many instances where opposition parties
boycott elections simply to discredit the incumbents, and when they realise
that their chance of winning is low. Could this be the strategy the Movement
for Democratic Change, the US and Britain employed ahead of last week’s
Zimbabwe elections – by predicting that they would be rigged – to discredit
Zanu-PF? The study also revealed that, between 1990 and 2001, almost 30 percent
of all elections in sub-Saharan Africa were boycotted by at least one
opposition party. It is interesting to note that even in those elections which
were declared “free and fair”, the losers accepted the result only 40 percent
of the time. After reviewing 54 elections in sub-Saharan Africa, it is claimed
that in 33 the major opposition parties rejected the results immediately. Out
of these 33 cases, in 25 instances the losers challenged the results in court.
Only in rare instances (Mali 1977, Benin 1996, Madagascar 2001) did opposition
parties’ legal appeals win favourable court rulings. However, only in one case
(Madagascar 2001) was the election result wholly overturned by the court. In 25
cases, protests occurred following the elections. To sum up, it was argued in
the study that though election boycotts could be useful to expose the misdeeds
of the ruling parties, at the same time they had a negative effect on
opposition parties. Repeated election boycotts by the opposition would allow
incumbents to control parliament. Moreover, the international community
regarded political boycotts with high suspicion except in the most
extraordinary circumstances, the study concluded. However, in the case of
Zimbabwe the West always judges election results negatively. There were
accusations that the ANC rigged the 1994 elections in South Africa, but the
West says nothing about that because it knows that under the ANC its interests
are safeguarded. President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF won last week’s presidential
and the parliamentary elections comfortably and the MDC leader Morgan
Tsvangirai cried foul. The US and Britain also cast doubt on the legitimacy of
the results. Are elections in Zimbabwe going to be regarded as free and fair
only when Tsvangirai’s MDC has won? What about the elections in the US? Are
they free and fair? They are controlled by companies that own the voting
machines and refuse to have them checked and examined. No party can challenge
election results successfully in the US. The US’s Electoral College is not
democratic. The US sees a splinter in Zimbabwe’s eye but does not see a log in
its own. The US and most Western countries are oligarchies and plutocracies.
They are ruled by a few rich people. Moreover, the US held rigged elections in
some countries the same way it did in Korea where General John R Hodge,
commander of the US Occupation Forces, held a rigged election during its
division into North and South. The US is the last country that should moralise
about rigged elections. In Africa the first political parties that were voted
into power, especially post-independence political parties, latched on to power
and did not want to relinquish even an iota of it. Angola, Botswana,
Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa provide good case studies. Many of the
post-independence regimes in Africa were removed from office through military
coups, but the military regimes also became corrupt and were in turn toppled.
However, the US and some Western countries toppled regimes that were not
pliant, not only on the continent but also in Asia and Latin America. Examples
abound; the regimes of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Arbenz Guzmán in
Guatemala in 1954, José Antonio Remón of Panama in 1955, Patrice Lumumba in
1961 and Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Other popular leaders who were believed to have
been assassinated by the US were Jorge Eliécer Gaitán of Colombia in 1948 and
Kim Koo of Korea in 1949, Eduardo Mondlane of Mozambique in 1969 and Amilcar
Cabral of Cape Verde in 1973. Finally, Zimbabwe is probably the only sovereign
country on the African continent which most Africans are proud of. It is not
under US and British tutelage and trusteeship. Zimbabwe does not need to be
lectured on how to run elections by the imperialist and corrupt US and EU
governments or condemned for rigging elections by the riggers of elections in
their own countries as well as in foreign lands. * Sam Ditshego is a researcher
at the Pan Africanist Research Institute. ** The views expressed here are not
necessarily those of Independent Newspapers. The Star
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