Nikuv at it again

via Nikuv at it again – The Zimbabwean 24 March 2015

The shadowy Israeli consultancy Nikuv, which is said to have helped Zanu (PF) win a controversial landslide in 2013, has had a hand in the preparation of voters’ rolls for two impending by-elections.

The by-elections will be held on Friday in the Chirumanzu-Zibagwe and Mount Darwin West constituencies to fill the seats left by Emmerson Mnangagwa and Joice Mujuru.

Mnangagwa was elevated to vice president at the Zanu (PF) congress last December, replacing Mujuru, his bitter rival in the race to succeed 91-year-old Robert Mugabe.

Information given to The Zimbabwean shows that an Israeli called Lior Hazan, who sources said worked for Nikuv International Projects, modified electronic data on the constituency rolls for the by-elections on March 14.

This modification occurred well after the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission had compiled the constituency rolls for the by-elections, but the sources said it indicated that he must have been the one who also sent an earlier version of the electronic roll samples for use in the pilot voter registration exercise for the two constituencies.

The fact that Hazan modified the electronic data on the new rolls for the by-elections after ZEC announced that it had completed its pilots for Chirumanzu-Zibagwe and Mount Darwin West indicates that Nikuv is still in charge of the register and is constantly tampering with it, speculated the sources. The data was extracted from the roll used in 2013 and Rita Makarau, the chairperson of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, has already confirmed that a new national register would borrow from the old one.

No idea

“I don’t have a single idea who Hazan is. Probably he is working with the Registrar General’s office where the main voters’ roll is still kept. I wouldn’t know how the electronic roll has been handled and am not sure about the availability of the electronic roll now.

“For the purpose of the pilot project in Chirumanzu-Zibagwe and Mount Darwin West, we (ZEC) only got isolated and constituency-specific information from the main data base at the RG’s office which is too big to deliver all at once,” said Makarau.

The sources pointed out that as it was now clear that the electronic roll was available, it must be made public in keeping with a 2013 court order.

All along the RG’s office has claimed that it could not avail the roll before and after the 2013 general elections because its computer system was down. A July 30 High Court provisional order compelled ZEC and the Registrar of Voters, then under the RG’s office, to avail the hard copy of the voter register by July 31, on election day, and that was done.

Regarding the electronic version, the High Court ordered: “Respondents shall avail to all the applicants the electronic copies of the voters’ roll as soon as their electronic equipment becomes operational.”

All along ZEC has been claiming that the computer system was not operational. Makarau said she was not aware if the system had been fixed.

An undiluted lie

Tendai Biti, then secretary general of MDC-T, had filed the court application on behalf of his party.

In an interview, he insisted that ZEC, the RG and the ruling Zanu (PF) had always had the roll but were too afraid to release it for public scrutiny.

“This is an undiluted lie. There is no way in which you can have a hard copy of the roll and not the soft copy which can then be converted to other formats. It is unheard of for a government to operate a voting process without a backup system.

“Mark my word, the Zanu (PF) government will never avail the electronic roll because it knows people will closely scrutinise it and expose the skeletons. They don’t have to worry because they have Nikuv on their side. Nikuv is running the show and ZEC doesn’t know what’s happening,” Biti told The Zimbabwean.

Nikuv, which has been involved in other countries’ elections where rigging was alleged and was paid at least $10 million by the Zimbabwean government in 2013, is now reported to be based at the KGIV army barracks in Harare where national identity documentation is processed in conjunction with the RG’s office.

Apparently to make it difficult to follow the data, the files that were given for the by-election rolls are not ordinarily searchable as required by the constitution.

Said one of the sources, an expert on electoral matters: “The files have been presented in macro ‘filters’ that allow certain filtering within the file, but not across constituencies. In this case a comprehensive search is not possible in the format supplied by ZEC.”