Murdered Tsvangirai aide still on voters roll

By Lance Guma
24 March 2008

A former aide to Morgan Tsvangirai who was murdered by ruling party militants in the run up to the 2000 parliamentary election, is still on the voter’s roll 8 years later. The name of Tichaona Chiminya is one of many so called ‘ghost voters’ whose names still appear on the controversial roll. Election expert Topper Whitehead who runs the Free-Zim Support Group in Exile, released an interim report detailing the irregularities. Chiminya, who was killed alongside fellow activist Talent Mabika in a petrol bomb attack by CIO agent Joseph Mwale, is listed in the Harare East constituency.

Murdered white farmers David Oates and David Stevens are also listed as voters on the roll. Stevens is on the Murehwa South constituency roll while Oates is listed in Zvimba. Both were murdered in 2000 during violent land invasions sanctioned by Robert Mugabe. It was also revealed earlier this month that Desmond Lardner-Burke, a former Minister for Justice in the Rhodesian government who died long ago, is still on the Mount Pleasant voters roll. Trudy Stevenson, a parliamentary candidate for the Mutambara MDC in the area, said there are people over 100 years old on each page of the voters roll. Making a complete mockery of the roll is the fact that a significant number of newly registered voters are over 100 years old.

Explaining how they examined the voters roll Whitehead said they were only able to obtain some CD’s in image form and these needed the painstaking process of converting the pictures into text. He pointed to thousands of duplicate voters on the roll whose national ID numbers were identical. He also accused the Registrar General of playing around with the first two numbers on each ID. For example the same ID number could be registered under different registration centres, making only the prefix on the ID number different. Whitehead said only a careful selection of the numbers in sequence helped bring out the duplication.

Whitehead worked tirelessly for years to expose the rigging of the 2002 presidential election. But after 7 court cases and the near arrest of the Registrar General for ignoring a court order, Mugabe’s government deported him on the flimsy grounds he had taken up South African citizenship.