PVT OR NO PVT, TO TRUST ECZ OR NOT TO

By GERSHOM NDHLOVU
ACCORDING to Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopaedia, Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) is an election observation methodology that is employed for independent verification (or challenge) of election results. It involves observation of the voting and counting of ballots at the polling stations, collection of official polling station results and independent tabulation of these results, parallel to election authorities. If the PVT is performed on statistical sample of the polling stations, it is called Quick Count.
Organizers from the Philippine National Citizen Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL), says Wikipedia, are widely recognized as the pioneers of the quick count, or parallel vote tabulation (PVT), in emerging democracies. During a 1986 election for President, NAMFREL attempted to mirror the official count of all 90,000 polling stations. They performed a remarkable task in collecting data from the majority of polling stations, and they were instrumental in helping uncover the massive vote counting fraud attempted by Marcos supporters.
The will of the people of a country is the basis for the authority of government, and that will must be determined through genuine periodic elections, which guarantee the right and opportunity to vote freely and to be elected fairly through universal and equal suffrage by secret balloting or equivalent free voting procedures, the results of which are accurately counted, announced and respected. A significant number of rights and freedoms, processes, laws and institutions are therefore involved in achieving genuine democratic elections. This according to the 2005 Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation and Code of Conduct for International Election Observers, a document endorsed by, among others, the African Union and the Southern African Development Community Parliamentary Forum (Read full report here)
But, unfortunately, PVT has sent the Zambian ruling MMD government and its supporters into overdrive threatening Civic Organisations that want to conduct it in this year’s upcoming elections, and its advocates with arrest. The government and those against PVT are foretelling fire and brimstone in the event that PVT is allowed to be carried out. The anti-PVT lobby is giving examples of countries where PVT has allegedly brought about problems, among them, Ivory Coast where both, the sitting president Laurent Gbagbo, and opposition leader Alassane Ouattara have claimed victory and declared themselves president.
I, however, would say that PVT which was conducted by the Zimbabwe Election Support Network in Zimbabwe in 2008 prevented the country’s Elections body from manipulating the results in favour of President Robert Mugabe just in the first round. But since the Elections body was caught out, it took it six weeks to announce the results which saw the election going into a second round run-off from which opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirayi pulled out because of violence against his supporters that was perpetuated by ZANU PF supporters.
As for Ivory Coast, the Constitutional Court, chaired by Gbagbo’s crony, overturned the results announced by the Electoral Commission.
Zambia’s Minister of Information and Broadcasting Services Ronnie Shikapwasha who is also Chief Government Spokesman and National Assembly Speaker Amusaa Mwanamwambwa have gone further to say that it is only the Electoral Commission of Zambia that is mandated to announce election results. That, for me, is definitely without doubt but what is at issue is the trust, or worse still, the lack of it that the ECZ attracts.
Much as the argument that there are legal mechanisms in place to challenge elections is concerned, the history of Zambia has been such that once a president has been sworn in, no petition by opposition parties has been ruled against the incumbent president even in the face of glaring evidence of electoral malpractice. To make matters worse, petitions have been known to drag on for years to an extent that by the time they are concluded, it is only a year before the next election.
Election rigging is not so much about stuffing ballots, but what is done before and after the elections. First and foremost, the ruling government which controls some of the media, does not allow such media to give coverage to opposition parties for them to sell their manifestoes and reach out to potential supporters. In the event that the ECZ were to mis-count and erroneously, or most likely deliberately, announced a presidential candidate as a winner, verifying presidential ballots is not easy as PF’s Michael Sata discovered at the last elections when he lost to President Rupiah Banda.
In all this, we are not saying that the MMD should lose elections. On the contrary, we want the MMD to win and win convincingly and the opposition to lose and lose conclusively without crying “rigged”! This is the reason why both the ECZ and the government as the overall overseer of the ECZ, should work on trust that people should repose in the commission. The raving and ranting by government officials and pro-government NGOs is just arousing suspicion as to what the motive of the ruling party is.

CUT THE PRETENCE OF THE UPND/PF PACT

By Gershom Ndhlovu

The UPND/PF, or is it the PF/UPND, Pact has squandered the people’s goodwill with which it was welcomed when it was announced just over two years ago. Truth be told, this political alliance between the two opposition parties is going nowhere. It is high time the two leaders, UPND’s Hakainde Hichilema and PF’s Michael Sata, faced up to reality and went their own individual ways.
Going by the history of elections in Zambia, which are normally held between October and December, political parties taking part only have nine to eleven months to prepare for the local government, parliamentary and presidential polls. For the two Pact parties to be still talking about the possibility of harmonising, rather than polishing their joint, manifestoes, policies and other strategies is too little too late.
The two political parties squandered their chance to consummate their “marriage” in June of last year when they officially announced the formation of the Pact at a rally in Lusaka. It was there that they should have told the nation their way forward regarding the manifesto, policy, leadership and strategy-wise. The statements coming out of the two parties now are not helping matters at all.
The danger is that if both the UPND and the PF hang on to the Pact which, for all intents and purposes, only exists on people’s lips rather than on paper, they will disadvantage themselves because by the time elections are announced, they will not be ready regarding who is to be their joint candidates at local government, parliamentary and most importantly, their presidential candidates.
If the two parties were serious with their Pact, the citizens would have by now known the presidential candidate picked by representatives of the two parties and the bickering going on, would have been behind them. What should have been remaining at this point in time was to tighten the last bolts and nuts of the government-in-waiting.
The most unfortunate development of the Pact’s existence is that the two parties have rarely held rallies together or at least acknowledged one another at these fora. It would appear to any discerning eye is that there is a lot of distrust between the two parties. Both leaders also think they are better placed to be the presidential candidate.
“While it is true that choice of the PACT Presidential candidate is important, the Joint Economic, Social and Good Governance programme is even more important as this is the basis upon which the citizens of Zambia are pinning their hopes on for a better Zambia.
“UPND believes that reaching consensus on the joint Economic, Social and Good Governance programme and the choice of Presidential candidate (together with other positions) should be taken as a package, not in isolation. In any case, the UPND’s considered view is that whoever is chosen to be PACT Presidential candidate should commit to the agreed Economic, Social and Good Governance programme.”
Principally, the above quote from the UPND’s statement of a few days ago underlines fundamental points making it reluctant to give away its position of leading the Pact. On the other hand, it appears that the PF derives its strength in being the second largest party at least going by the number of MPs in parliament and possibly that its leader, Sata, emerged second in the 2008 presidential by-elections.
Going by media stories, it appears that the PF is in full swing campaigning for itself in almost all parts of Zambia including the perceived UPND strongholds. From this alone, the UPND should abandon the pretence of the existence of the Pact before it is too late, to go out and campaign for itself in areas where it is patently weak such as the Copperbelt, Luapula, Northern, Eastern and parts of Central Province before it is too late.
The PF has also not refuted media stories of its potential cabinet which did not have any member of the UPND in it. This in itself shows how whoever came up with that list views members of the Pact partner party. This error of omission or commission could have been understandable early last year but it coming out early this year, especially unrefuted, is inexcusable.
Both the UPND and the PF should realise that the presidential poll parade is not shrinking, but rather expanding. Before the two parties know it, there will be eleven presidential candidates, obviously most of them pretenders, on the ballot paper. This is the time the two parties take decisive action on what they want to do instead of pulling the wool over people’s eyes about the existence of a Pact that is not there at all.
For now, I say to both Hichilema and Sata, cut the pretence about the existence of the Pact, or come up with something more concrete.
(Read related stories/posts here and here)