With about nine months remaining before Zimbabweans go for the general elections next year, former cabinet minister, Professor Jonathan Moyo, has said the country is still not ready for free fair and credible 2023 polls.
Moyo, who fled the country in November 2017 at the height of the coup which dethroned former president Robert Mugabe, was speaking in a wide-ranging interview with a local newspaper over the weekend.
Moyo and Patrick Zhuwao, also living in exile, last week wrote a joint letter apologising to the ZANU-PF members for supporting President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s rival Nelson Chamisa in the 2018 elections and associating themselves with the #ZanuPFMustGo hashtag as they piled pressure on Mnangagwa to step aside.
Next year’s elections are constitutionally scheduled to be held between July and August.
“No, I don’t think any rational or fair-minded person would say that the necessary political, institutional and legal imperatives to hold free, fair and credible elections are now in place for the 2023 harmonised general election due within the next nine months,” said Moy in an interview with a local publication.
“The delimitation exercise is yet to be finalised and it is surrounded by lots of questions and concerns, there are still too many controversies about the availability, accessibility, reliability and credibility of the voters’ roll – this is a major concern because an election is a voters’ roll – and the fact that ZEC (Zimbabwe Electoral Commission) is doing precious little to address these and other related issues legally, transparently, efficiently and effectively; dents the country’s readiness to hold free, fair and credible elections.”
Meanwhile, Moyo has reiterated that he would not campaign for Chamisa in next year’s elections unlike in 2018.
“As far as the 2023 election campaign is concerned, I told Chamisa in writing in November 2021 that I will not campaign for him in 2023 or do anything like what I did for him in 2018; Chamisa has that information which I gave him and my reasons in November 2021,” he said.
“I have also said this on my Twitter handle many times before. And here is my point about this; based on working closely with Nelson Chamisa and supporting him around the clock from 2018 to 2021, I reached a truly clear conclusion that he and his noisy supporters are unhelpable and unsupportable.”
