Wilson Johwa

Political Correspondent

ON THE eve of Zimbabwe’s general election, opposition parties have expressed concern that by the time the counting of votes starts, election observers’ accreditation will have expired, preventing them from watching over the counting process.

At a news conference in Johannesburg yesterday, presidential candidate Simba Makoni’s campaign co- ordinator, Nkosana Moyo, said foreign observers were accredited only until voting day. According to the former Zimbabwean cabinet minister, this raised the question of who would monitor the counting and the likely second round run-off, should Saturday’s presidential vote produce no clear winner. In terms of Zimbabwe’s constitution, if none of the presidential candidates gets 51% of the vote or more, a run-off between the top two contenders must take place within 21 days. Although this had no precedent, analysts predict that the second round could determine what appears to be a closely contested presidential poll.

A senior member of the 54-person South African observer team, who did not want to be named for fear of breaching protocol, said although their accreditation tags had March 29 as the expiry date, they were told this was a mistake. “They acknowledged that they made a mistake, we did check,” he said. But the cards had not been changed. “We will be here until the end,” the official said.

The accreditation “bungle” affected journalists as well.

“It’s a costly mistake, meaning that beyond that date technically we’ll be covering the election without accreditation,” said a Harare-based journalist.

But the Pan African Parliament’s information officer Khalid Dahab said members of its 19-member observer mission were accredited until April 10.

“I would assume that is the expiry date,” he said from Zimbabwe where the mission was deployed in all 10 provinces.

Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) official Eddie Cross shared Moyo’s concern.

“They don’t do things like this casually,” he said. However, he said the foreign observers would be too few to make a difference in a country nearly the size of Texas, which had 9000 polling stations. More than 1400 observers had been accredited.

He had harsh words for the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC’s) 150 observers. “SADC observers seem to be incredibly naive. They don’t understand what’s going on on the ground.”