Former Information Minister-turned-government critic, Professor Jonathan Moyo has accused Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) member Norman Rusty Markham of employing underhanded tactics to outsmart incumbent Harare East legislator Tendai Biti for the ticket to represent the party in this year’s Parliamentary elections.
Moyo who has in recent times criticised the CCC candidates’ selection process saying it lacked credibility and fairness alleged that Markham used dirty tactics, influence peddling, and threatened his laborers to secure votes in his favor.
“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,” said Prof. Moyo.
He argued the selection process lacked innovation and democracy, asserting that the “vote by queuing behind your candidate” system had long been discredited and replaced by secret voting methods in modern democracies.
“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” or “Bereka Mwana” voting system as it was called when it was controversially used by Zanu PF 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 Quite the contrary, that voting method is primitive and crude, that’s why it has been replaced by the secret vote or secret ballot in all modern and innovative democratic voting processes,” said Moyo.
The former Minister further criticized the optics of the selection process, referring to widely circulated images of Hon Markham’s ‘labourers’ standing behind him during the voting process.
“Like 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. The image speaks for itself, and what it says to any thinking and rational person is awful and disgraceful!” Moyo said.
The opposition movement concluded its candidate selection process over the weekend amid reports that the party had deviated from its initial stance of candidates being nominated by citizens turning to the controversial queue behind your candidate.
