Zanu-PF contests MDC bid in top court
HARARE: The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) yesterday submitted papers to Zimbabwe’s Constitutional Court in a bid to dismiss a petition by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-Alliance) challenging the outcome of the recent presidential elections.
The governing party hired a strong team of 12 local lawyers, spearheaded by advocates Lewis Uriri and Thembinkosi Magwaliba, to defend president-elect Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose victory the MDC-Alliance’s Nelson Chamisa is disputing.
Mnangagwa polled 50.8% of the vote to Chamisa’s 44.3%.
Chamisa’s legal team, led by Chris Mhike and advocate Thabani Mpofu, filed its papers last week.
In the Constitutional Court case, the MDC-Alliance is claiming the elections were rigged.
It also wants Chamisa to be declared the new president of Zimbabwe.
The MDC-Alliance further alleges that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) had failed to account for 700 000 votes cast in the July 30 polls.
However, Zanu-PF in its papers argues that the MDC-Alliance can’t prove to the Constitutional Court that the outcome of the presidential elections was incorrect.
It said the opposition had failed to make use of a provision in the Electoral Act that calls for the recounting of votes to be inducted within 48 hours, particularly where rigging is suspected.
In a litany of allegations, the MDC-Alliance claims the election results were not credible, nor was the poll free and fair. It maintains that ZEC chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba delegated the announcement of the provincial presidential results to fellow commissioners, a violation of the constitution.
Other claims of vote rigging are that thousands of registered voters sympathetic to Chamisa, mainly more than 40 000 teachers in the countryside, who acted as polling officers during the elections, were disenfranchised and systematically denied their voting right. It also claimed that 21 polling stations went “missing” on polling day.
Chamisa further accused the ZEC of deliberately deploying teachers and other civil servants to polling stations far from the areas where they were registered to vote.
“I have established that some 40 000 teachers did not vote. And many more civil servants who were involved in the elections were similarly disenfranchised,” Chamisa alleges in court papers.
The impasse over the vote outcome led to the postponement of the presidential inauguration, which was scheduled to take place this past weekend. – CAJ News/ African News Agency (ANA)