To my fellow Zimbabweans I cannot speak to you on the national media, but I speak to you from my heart - that freedom comes and your voice and your vote shall be heard.
Morgan Tsvangirai, 17 April 2008

Statement made by President Morgan Tsvangirai: 17 April 2008

Today on the eve of Independence Day in Zimbabwe, I'm here to thank the World for the help you are giving the liberation struggle of our nation.

This is, in many ways, the saddest Independence Day since our independence from colonial rule in 1980.

Our people are literally starving; Zimbabwe is amongst the worst humanitarian crisis of this new century.

Our humanitarian crisis has political roots, and that gives us hope, because political problems have political solutions.

A reliable source in the Ministry of Home Affairs has revealed that while frustrated Zimbabweans queue in their thousands to obtain their birth certificates, identity and passport documents, Government has hijacked the process and is clandestinely handing out documents to Zanu-PF supporters. "These supporters from far off places are preferentially given identity cards and passports and registered as voters", this is in order to reconfigure the Harare and Bulawayo urban constituency voters rolls ahead of the 2008 harmonised elections.

Zimbabwe's electoral law allows only holders of national identity cards and passports to vote.

Sequence of events

On Thursday last (March 31) a theft of breath-taking proportions took place in Zimbabwe. Stolen from the citizens of this land was their constitutional right to elect their own representatives to Parliament. So great was the scale of the national heist that effectively it took from the people the government of their choice and foisted upon them a government they did not want and had not voted for.

The Mugabe regime had been planning to rig the elections from the moment the date was announced – indeed from long before that, for this regime knows well enough it would be trounced by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) opposition party in any free and fair contest. So the preparations to rig the poll had to begin early. Without the months of careful preparation and total manipulation of the electoral process ZANU-PF knew it would face extinction in the poll.

But the purpose of this short piece is not to describe the months of cynical scheming, including the manipulation of the entire food delivery system and the cunning re-writing of the country’s electoral laws, effectively to put Mugabe appointees in command, with the military to control it. That story has been told elsewhere (see our own “SADC Checklist” which reviewed the electoral and security legislation, and our weekly feature “Mauritius Watch” which chronicled events on the ground). Nor is it our purpose here to review the widespread and systematic abuses of the SADC election guidelines which occurred on the day of voting - such as the use of a supposedly indelible ink to mark the fingers of those who had voted, which it transpired could be easily removed by the application of a mild detergent. These abuses will no doubt be documented by others before too long.

No, our purpose here is to take our readers through the events of the evening and night following the poll, specifically between 7.00 pm when voting ended and 11.00 pm, for it was during these few hours that ZANU-PF’s central rigging strategy was carried out.