MDC doubts fair court hearing

via MDC doubts fair court hearing | The Zimbabwean by Edgar Gweshe

The MDC-T is sceptical of a “fair hearing” in their election petition in which they are pushing for results of the July 31 polls to be declared null and void.

This comes after the Electoral Court reserved judgement in a case in which the party wants the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to furnish it with election material so that they can adequately prepare their challenge of the presidential election results.

Addressing journalists at the party’s headquarters today, MDC-T spokesperson, Douglas Mwonzora, said the Electoral Court had failed to realise the urgency of the matter.

He said the development raised suspicion of foul play to weaken his party’s challenge of presidential results which saw President Robert Mugabe amassing 61 percent against the MDC-T leader, Morgan Tsvangirai’s 34 percent.

“The MDC-T National Executive today noted with concern that the judgement pertaining to the release of election material was reserved.

We find it a bit disturbing that the Electoral Court, given the urgency of the matter, has reserved judgement indefinitely.

“We are concerned that the delay in giving us election material, especially the number of people who were not on the voters’ roll but voted, may be deliberate to allow those who want to fix the voters’ roll to do that,” said Mwonzora.

The election material the MDC-T is seeking includes the number of people who voted but were not on the voters’ roll as well as the official number of assisted voters.

However, ZEC has since opposed the MDC-T application for election material to be availed to the party.

“Given that, it is doubtful whether MDC will receive a fair hearing in this case. We just hope we won’t be given this material a few hours to go to this case. ZEC opposed the application for election material to be availed to us and that in itself is a statement.

“If the elections were free as they (ZEC and Zanu (PF))would like to claim, then why would they want to oppose this application,” said Mwonzora.

He said his party had prepared a dossier that would be handed over to the Southern African Development Community at the regional bloc’s summit of Heads of States and Government in Lilongwe, Malawi, tomorrow.

Mwonzora dismissed claims that the founding affidavit of the petition seeking to nullify results of the harmonised elections was not made under oath.

“We have very competent lawyers. Those are actually misguided claims,” he said.

Recent reports emanating from the official media indicated that the lawyers had tendered founding affidavits without Tsvangirai’s signature.