On August 23, more than 6 million Zimbabwean voters will be called to the polls to elect their president and their parliament in a tense context. The outgoing head of state, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who overthrew Robert Mugabe in 2017, intends to keep his place. Opposite, the opposition has been facing bans on gatherings and arrests for months. The electoral register is a sensitive point, this subject having already haunted past elections.
2 mins
With our regional correspondent, Claire Bargeles
This week, the Harare High Court refused to give Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC), Nelson Chamisa’s opposition party, access to the latest version of the electoral file. The judge considers that this is a “non-urgent” request, although the elections will be held in less than a week. Earlier in the year, justice had already rejected the request for publication of an electronic version of the file, considering it to be a “sensitive document”.
The main opposition party denounces a violation of the Constitution and fears that the list will be manipulated in order to rig the elections. Indeed, when a first version of the file was available, many people were surprised not to see their name appear, or to have been moved to more distant polling stations.
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Activists from the Team Pachedu association also denounce numerous irregularities, with, for example, identity numbers attached to different names compared to previous files. Administrative chaos, or real strategy: for the organization Human Rights Watch, this is in any case one of the reasons why the environment of this election can hardly be considered as ” credible, free and fair “.
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The CCC continues to exhaust all legal proceedings to try to access this final electoral file. The party also denounces numerous irregularities in the postal vote by police officers, which began this week, and claims to have received testimonies from officers forced to vote in front of their superiors.