Civic groups want independent poll and right to educate voters

Civic organisations in Zimbabwe told IRIN on Thursday that for next year's presidential poll to be free, voter education should be encouraged and a genuinely independent electoral commission established as soon as possible.

Local human rights watchdog ZimRights this week announced it had produced a manual on voter education which could be used as a guide by organisations and individuals involved in preparations for next year’s presidential election. "We've done lots of research and it's clear that many Zimbabweans do not vote because they are afraid of the process," David Jamali of ZimRights told IRIN.

ZimRights was trying to get to poorly-educated rural Zimbabweans who, Jamali said, had "been the victims of government misinformation". He said rural people told ZimRights that the government had informed them that by using computers they could tell who had voted for who. The decision to go ahead with the manual is seen as defying a planned move by the government to ban civic organisations from carrying out voter education ahead of the poll which pits President Robert Mugabe against opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

"We have been working on this manual for more than six months and we tried to answer most of the practical questions on voter education," Jamali told IRIN. The manual, "You And The Vote", provides information on the importance of voting and urges Zimbabweans to exercise their right to choose by participating in elections. Distribution of the manual was being held up by lack of funds, Jama said.

Information Minister Jonathan Moyo has said the government is considering banning civic groups, churches and aid agencies from conducting voter education programmes because they have "hidden agendas". The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), a coalition of 38 civic organisations, told IRIN it was concerned by ruling party statements in parliament in August suggesting that civic organisations be barred from conducting voter education. "We will continue to maintain a dialogue with government and lobby for the constitutional right to educate our people about why voting is important," Rindai Chipfunde of ZESN told IRIN.

Mugabe’s government had ruled out the establishment of an Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) to conduct next year’s presidential election and was instead formulating a code of conduct to clamp down on activities of Zimbabwean and foreign election observers, the 'Financial Gazette' reported on Thursday, quoting official sources. "The issue of the IEC is out," a senior cabinet minister told the newspaper. The action could set the government in direct confrontation with opposition and civic organisations demanding the formation of a genuine IEC as a minimum condition under which a free and fair ballot can be staged.

"Without an IEC the (presidential) elections will be a foregone conclusion," Lovemore Madhuku, chair of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), another influential civic coalition, told IRIN. Madhuku dismissed the Electoral Supervisory Commission (ESC), which has conducted elections since independence, as "an arm of the civil service totally under government control". Government wants the ESC to stage the presidential poll, which must be held by the end of March.

The NCA also wants international and Zimbabwean election observers to be deployed across Zimbabwe well ahead of the ballot. But the government wants the work of election observers, both local and foreign, to be regulated because it accuses them of interfering with Zimbabwe’s internal politics. "We have held parliamentary and presidential elections since independence using the system which we have in place and these have been successful. So what is new about next year’s election?" a minister, preferring not to be named, told the 'Financial Gazette'. He added: "As for election observers, we do not have problems with them, but we will put in place rules to monitor their conduct so they will not interfere with the electoral process."

One international election observer body contacted condemned the possibility of government regulation of election observers, but declined to be quoted for fear of souring relations. "At the end of the day we have to be invited in by Zimbabwe's government to monitor, so a relationship has to be maintained," the source said. The US and the 15-nation European Union have demanded the deployment of poll observers to check on the validity of the presidential election. But David Pottie of the Johannesburg-based Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) told IRIN that regulation of election observers could be a positive step if it was part of an overall strategy to make the poll more transparent and better organised.