Denford Magora's Latest Zimbabwe News Blog

By 2:30a.m. Monday morning, we are informed Vice President Chiwenga was able to relax on the basis that the election was pretty much in the bag. Was he correct? Let's break it down? Nelson Chamisa is almost certain to do better than Morgan Tsvangirai did in 2013, especially in the urban, peri-urban and growth point areas. But we are likely not to get anything resembling the 2008 results. No GNU is in the offing, unless it is on the Mnangagwa's terms, with Nelson Chamisa as a quarrelsome supplicant. The root of this scenario is the failure by the NPF and Thokozani Khupe to be factors in this election. Mnangagwa is doing better than most would have expected in the urban constituencies and wards. Nelson Chamisa has managed to consolidate the vote of the opposition around his presidential ambitions here. But the opposition numbers have never managed to overwhelm ZANU PF nationally, even when consolidated. It may not look like it, but apathy also played a part. Apath...

All the drama that Nelson Chamisa is currently engaged is completely unnecessary and utterly self-defeating. The MDC Alliance and all the opposition candidates are well placed to stop any supposed rigging without damaging the institutions of our country that are needed to make sure democracy endures and Zimbabwe becomes prosperous. And stopping any potential rigging is so easy one now understands why most observers are now of the view that Nelson Chamisa and his Alliance are cry-babies who do not want to go elections at all for fear of a loss and to push for a non-elected GNU. ZEC has said that the Voters' Roll they gave out is clean, it has not ghosts on it. Chamisa and his people do not believe them. Fine. Skepticism is a good thing. But there is a better and more ironclad way to not only check this, but also protect the vote of Zimbabweans. Instead of insulting the ZEC Chair, alarming and demotivating his supporters will constant talk of a basically already-stolen vot...

Observers say they are stunned at the complete absence of any strategy or campaign at the constituency level by Nelson Chamisa's MDC Alliance. It is a criminal neglect of a key pillar of his success as a presidential candidate Nelson Chamisa, the presidential candidate of the MDC Alliance so carefully and thoughtfully put together by the late Morgan Tsvangirai, is running an utterly criminal election campaign that focuses solely and almost entirely on his own personal ambition only. Chamisa has convinced all watchers that he does not believe in the Alliance he purports to lead. Evidence of this is scattered all over the electoral landscape like bodies on a battlefield. Parliamentary candidates for the Alliance have been neglected and their dejection is on full display around Zimbabwe, in contrast with the candidates of Khupe's MDC and Mnangagwa's ZANU PF. Even independents like Fadzai Mahere in Mt Pleasent are outgunning Alliance candidates in terms of energy, ...

Welshman Ncube of the MDC Alliance, at Ross Police Camp in Bulawayo today, where police voted today in an incident made a scandal only by the fact that ZEC appeared not to know that ballot papers that it should be in charge of were now in Bulawayo, at a police camp   It is a blunder of monumental proportions, no doubt and we do not need to recount to you what transpired at Ross Police Camp in Bulawayo. But just in case you have been on Mars today, here goes: An alert was sent to the MDC Alliance by a policeman at Ross Camp saying the policemen there were being "forced" to vote in the presence of their superiors and crying out for help. The Alliance immediately broadcast the alert across social media. The Acting Chief Elections Officer for ZEC denied that there was any voting taking place, saying he was still processing postal vote applications. Videos and images soon emerged showing that there had indeed been voting at that Camp and ZEC Commissioners scrambled t...

Things are getting very interesting now although I doubt Nelson Chamisa and his Alliance will be amused. It's stunning, I tell you. Although Nelson Chamisa believes he is going to meet Justice Chigumba tomorrow (Thursday July 12 2018), the ZEC Chair has decided that neither she nor her Commissioners will meet the opposition leader or any of his cronies. In a heated phone call today with Justice Minister Ziyambi, Chigumba threatened to seek a court injunction barring the Alliance from "harassing" ZEC and disrupting, interrupting and impeding the implementation of its mandate at law. The Justice Minister made it clear that he would not support that move, although he could not stop the ZEC Chair from proceeding with the action if she thought it suitable. He even went so far as to declare that his government would publicly distance itself from the move if it happens, just to register the position of government, since he could not order to proceed or not. After ...

The EU Observer Mission giving a press conference in Harare, at which only one journalists, from Openparlyzw, proved to be the only real journalist operating in Zimbabwe today. The European Union Observer Mission to Zimbabwe for the 2018 elections held a press conference today in Harare.  That press conference should be a cause for grave concern for ZEC and for the government of President Mnangagwa. The statement itself was full of diplomatic speak but it was the question and answer that really bust the whole thing wide open. Zimbabwe and the government should thank the guy called Daniel from Openparlyzw, who is the only journalist in that room who asked a real and pertinent question. All the other so-called journalists in that room appeared to have been there just to eat the sandwiches and are disgrace to the profession. Daniel asked about the process of observing the printing of the ballot paper and asked the observers to say whether they had come across similar issues...

Justice Chigumba, Chair of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission At a press conference this morning, Justice Chigumba, Chair of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, confirmed what we told you yesterday, that ZEC's official position is that  the voters roll that has been given to the public is the final voters' roll which includes the voters who registered during the verification period. The ZEC Chair says this puts paid to any claims that the voters' roll is fake. The information puts the MDC Alliance at a loss, primarily because they have no way to verify this and have to wait until voting day itself to see if there are any people in any ward who will vote but do not appear on the voters' roll supplied to candidates and the public. The objective of stopping anyone from pulling a move to delay or stop the election using discrepancies in the voters' roll has now been frustrated and neutralised. A court judgement is in place regarding the provisional voters ro...

You will recall that, after the 2013 elections, our analysis of the reasons behind the results of that election were the most quoted and cited by international media, from The Guradian & The Times in London to the New York Times and Washington Post, Sunday Times of South Africa and many others. Reuters also picked it up and distributed the analysis widely. So readers, we are reading the tea-leaves again and we will meet here when the results are announced. But we will be doing so to do what we did in 2013, which is basically to point out why our reading was, yet again, correct. And how it was, yet again, ignored by those who can most benefit from it. There is one particular bomb in the MPOI/Afrobarometer survey released in Bulawayo on Thursday, June 07 2018 as Zimbabwe prepares for an election to be held on July 30 this year. Basically, everyone, including MDC Alliance people, has missed this particular bomb. Buried in the results are results that will see Nelson Chamisa ge...

Nelson Chamisa, seen here at the launch of his manifesto for the 2018 elections, during which he vowed to establish diplomatic diplomatic relationships with Israel. The reasons behind that announcement are actually laughable. Pic by: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi (probably the best photo journalist working in Zimbabwe today!) It is difficult to believe that rumour, juvenile speculation and basic stupidity would inform the strategy of an organisation like the MDC, which is supposed to be a lofty embodiment of not only intelligence, but also the democratic principles we all want in Zimbabwe. But here it is. It has happened and it is happening. Nelson Chamisa of the MDC-T and Alliance declared at his party manifesto launch yesterday that his Alliance would immediately establish diplomatic relations with Israel if he is elected to the presidency of Zimbabwe. Shallow analysis of this move by almost every other so-called analyst has declared that this was done by the MDC-T in order to curr...

Confidence or panic? The level of discourse on Zimbabwe's social media sphere was the talk of a gathering of diplomats and the NGO Community recently, with focus the acrobatics being performed by Nelson Chamisa's supporters. At an Africa Day dinner on 24 May this year, I listened in horror as foreign diplomats and NGO-types dissected what they all agreed was an unbelievable degeneration of discourse on Zimbabwe's social media platforms. There's defence of the indefensible. Lies. Insults. That much can not be denied. The unanimous agreement around that room was that this behaviour is coming almost exclusively from the supporters of Nelson Chamisa's bit of the MDC-T (Madame Khupe claims ownership of the other bit). But that was not the revelation of the evening, no. One diplomat had a perspective that I found difficult not to go along with. The behaviour you are seeing from those that purport to support Chamisa is informed not by passion, but by panic, he ...

President Emmerson Mnangagwa is going to win the 2018 Harmonised election by a margin of between 218 000 and 392 000 individual votes. It will be a margin big enough to make calls of a recount moot. It will be small enough to give credibility to the masses that attend Nelson Chamisa's rallies these days. Most importantly, it will be enough margin to render the elections credible, free and fair. Where this margin, already guaranteed to President Mnangagwa, will come from, is the blind spot that the MDC Alliance has failed to locate. They have failed even to sniff it. The MDC Alliance and Nelson Chamisa have absolutely no clue how the President and the ruling party are going to win. But they know that they will win. So, the flailing pointing out of issues around the ballot paper printing, transportation and security is serving only to dig a deeper hole for the opposition alliance. Nelson Chamisa, who claims that, without him and without the Alliance, there will be no ...