The Financial Gazette

BULAWAYO - Simba Makoni, leader of Mavambo/Kusile/Dawn (MKD) party, has taken sides with ZANU-PF in calling for early polls, albeit after constitutional reforms that would prevent any form of rigging.

The MKD leader said the inclusive government, in which only three parties - ZANU-PF and the two formations of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) are participants - is not working out for Zimbabweans.
ZANU-PF has, since the beginning of the year, been demanding that Zimbabwe goes for the ballot this year with or without a new supreme law.
The election call had failed to find takers in the civil society and among other political formations worried about its impact on the recuperating national economy, particularly when viewed against the escalating political tensions countrywide.
The MDC factions have been insisting on the full implementation of a power-sharing pact that binds the three inclusive partners together, including security sector reforms, before the country could go for elections.
Owing to pressure from home and abroad to hold elections after the enactment of a new constitution, ZANU-PF last week dropped its call for elections this year with President Robert Mugabe intimating that polls would now be held no later than March 2012.
This week Makoni, a former finance minister who dumped ZANU-PF in February 2008 citing lack of democracy before challenging President Mugabe's candidature that same year, weighed in, saying elections are now long overdue.
"Are we ready to go to elections? I will give you the answer in two respects: The country needs elections the soonest because the inclusive government is not working for the people of Zimbabwe. But we must ensure that the next election will not give room for the result to be stolen from the winning candidate. That means we must have a credible, national constitution. We must have effective institutions of electoral management: independent, well-resourced with people of integrity, capacity and competence," Makoni said while responding to questions from journalists after a poorly attended rally held by his party on Sunday.
"We must also ensure that the whole electoral process is sufficiently resourced. You can't go to an election if you can't bring ballot boxes, print ballot papers; move them from Nguboyenja to the centre of the city or from the furthest rural area in Binga to the counting centre," he said.
"All those (factors) need to be put in place before we can ask the people of Zimbabwe to go to an election.
"So my view is that the country needs the election soonest so that we can establish an effective national authority that will work for the people. That election must be conducted under conditions that guarantee freeness and fairness," Ma-koni further explained.
The MKD leader has been relatively quiet after losing in the first round of the presidential race in March 2008.
He, however, denies that he has been quiet since 2008, instead blaming the media, wh-ich he said has been denying him coverage.
"No, no, I ha-ven't been silent. It's just that you haven't been reporting on me," he said.
Rating the performance of the co-alition government as "pathetic," Ma-koni also lamented the delays and squabbles in the constitution-making process envisaged to open a new cha-pter in the country's politics and governance.
"There is a lot of fighting for allo-wances, there is a lot of fighting for positions; there is a lot of fighting for ‘our view must be the one that dominate.' We haven't been presented a product yet of the outreach progra-mme," bemoaned Makoni.
MKD is demanding not only a limit to the presidential term in the new constitution but also 70 years as the cut-off age for the incumbent occupying the highest office in the land.
The party is also calling on the country to revert to the one chamber parliament of not more than 150 representatives elected through proportional representation.
Makoni said Zimbabwe is too poor to have the current bi-cameral legislative body of over 200 people.
The MKD leader said there is need for government and the perpetrators of Gukurahundi, Murambatsvina and the June 2008 presidential election run-off killings, among others, to admit and ack-nowledge what they did to compatriots and then genuinely ask for forgiveness before programmes of national healing could be undertaken.
"But it (national healing) cannot be decreed at a press conference by an announcement, which says ‘we are now healed," he said.
"It can also not be done by an awkward structure called organ (Organ on National Healing, Reconciliation and Reintegration), which makes Press conferences and organises seminars. We have to enable people who did wrong to others to engage directly.
"Our structures of traditional leadership, structures of faith and religion, and our structures of community leadership are the most effective starting points for healing and reconciliation," added Makoni.
With the constitutional referendum and subsequent elections to dismantle the shaky inclusive government expected any time after the conclusion of the constitution-making process, political parties are organising their structures to brace themselves for the battle for the control of Zimbabwe.
It is now not uncommon for weekends to just lapse without any political meeting having been organised in Bulawayo and the Matabeleland region at large.
- Own Correspondent