Self-exiled former ZANU PF Politburo member Jonathan Moyo has claimed that CCC’s candidate selection list in Harare East was rigged against incumbent legislator Tendai Biti.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that Harare North MP, Allan “Rusty” Markham, whose constituency was disbanded by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) during the delimitation exercise, won the ticket to represent CCC in Harare East.
Commenting on an image of Markham standing in front of his supporters who were queueing behind him during the CCC candidate selection process, Moyo said, “QUEUING BEHIND THE BOSS: This is a bad optic from CCC’s ‘candidate selection process’ in Harare yesterday!”
Responding to Moyo’s post, CCC official David Coltart accused the former of racism. He wrote: “This – Jonathan – is pathetic and beneath you. Why are you so brazenly racist?”
Moyo felt Coltart had insulted him, and went on to raise the rigging allegations in Harare East. Said Moyo:
CCC’S CANDIDATE SELECTION IN HARARE EAST RIGGED IN ADVANCE
I have noted your insult [David Coltart]. You are either paranoid by default or you think you guys are by definition untouchables by virtue of the colour of your skin, hence you reflexively pull the race card whenever blacks challenge your politics.
Learn to look before you leap. Otherwise, if you cannot stand the heat, just get out of the kitchen.
Your friend Hon Allan ‘Rusty’ Markham – a 1982 graduate of Gwebi Agricultural College, an enterprising peri-urban farmer and a former Harare councillor who used his City Hall stint between 2013 and 2018 to empower himself – has vested agribusiness, advisory services and land development commercial interests in Harare’s peri-urban areas, including in Harare East and Harare North, where, as a matter of fact, he is indeed a BOSS to many hand-to-mouth labourers whom he employs and underpays.
It would be a daunting task and a tall order to separate Hon Markham’s commercial interests from his politics in Harare.
Previously, voters in Harare East’s Ward 9 overwhelmingly supported Hon [Tendai Biti], the current Member of Parliament for the area.
But following the recent 2023 delimitation exercise which came up with new electoral boundaries for wards and constituencies, Harare East constituency now consists of Ward 9 which was part of the pre-delimitation Harare East, and Ward 18 which was part of the pre-delimitation Harare North, whose current Member of Parliament is Hon Markham.
So, the new electoral boundaries for Harare East constituency are made of Harare’s wards 9 and 18. Now, the nub of the issue is this.
In his underhanded campaign to be selected as CCC’s candidate for Harare East with its new electoral boundaries, Hon Markham used dirty tactics, name-dropping and influence peddling, including threatening to dismiss the desperate labourers he employs in Ward 9 if they did not ditch Hon Biti and vote for him.
Against this backdrop, it was diabolic for Hon Markham to conspire with the powers that be in CCC to conduct a selection process under which selectors or voters – many of them Hon Markham’s labourers – were required to queue behind the same Hon Markham, their BOSS as their ‘preferred’ parliamentary candidate for Harare East.
It’s a fact that Hon Markham employs cheap labour in Harare East, and elsewhere around Harare.
And it’s a fact that the labourers he employs in Harare East were coerced to vote for him by queuing behind him, their BOSS, and the explanation for this does not require the interpretive skills of a rocket scientist.
Only a scoundrel would take this no-brainer explanation as racism against Hon Markham, the scheming politician.
A candidate selection process for a general election must not only be fair but it must also be seen to be fair.
It is outrageous that CCC – which has claimed that its candidate selection process is “most innovative and most democratic” – was conducted on the basis of the discredited “queue behind your candidate” voting system or “Bereka Mwana”, as it was called when it was controversially used by ZanuPF before it was discarded ages ago.
There’s absolutely nothing innovative or democratic about voting by queuing behind a candidate.
Quite the contrary, that voting method is primitive and crude, that’s why it has been replaced by the secret vote or secret ballot in all modern and innovative democratic voting processes.
What made the bad “vote by queuing behind your candidate” in CCC’s selection process in Harare East worse, is that Hon Markham was shamelessly and unfairly given the advantage of having his labourers queue behind him, their BOSS, thereby turning the whole process into a self-evident charade and a monumental circus to achieve what was manifestly a predetermined outcome with the following numbers that lacked credibility:
Hon Rusty Markham
Ward 9: 228
Ward 18: 164
Total: 392Hon Tendai Biti
Ward 9: 254
Ward 18: 84
Total: 338Like elsewhere around the country, CCC’s much-touted candidate selection process did not advertise itself well in Harare East, where the selection outcome was clearly rigged in advance.
In the circumstances, the widely circulated picture of Hon Markham’s labourers cum voters standing behind him, as their BOSS, in CCC’s “vote by queuing behind your candidate” selection process in Harare East cut a terrible optic, and there are no two ways about that Hon, say what you want to say, but the image speaks for itself and what it says to any thinking and rational person is awful and disgraceful!
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