adminIt might mean the country will have to go for general elections sooner rather than later, a position the two MDC formations have been trying to avoid. Zanu-PF wants elections this year and says it is well prepared for the polls which will certainly bring to an end the inclusive Government which has largely been dysfunctional due to inter-party differences.
For a start the ruling only applies to three Matabeleland seats won by the smallest of the Parliamentary parties, the MDC, in 2008.
Other by-elections may have to be held for other vacant seats, either because the President wishes to do so or because someone with the necessary legal standing to bring an action goes to the High Court for the appropriate order. But even then the number is still under 40.
This would be something of a mini-general election and Finance Minister Tendai Biti will have to use part of the US$100 million Special Drawing Rights from the IMF that he had set aside for such an eventuality, if the President calls for all the pending by-elections to be held.
The other option would be for the three parties in the governing coalition to make these by-elections quick and cheap and end the threat of diversion from the main goal, simply by agreeing that the party which won last time in each constituency will field the only candidate from the three main parties.
The leaders could even ask their own supporters not to vote in the by-elections if they did not have an official party candidate.
We would suspect that in most constituencies outside the three seats subject to the court ruling, there would be no other candidate except the coalition candidate, who would be elected unopposed. The only other contestants could be independents and outside those three
Matabeleland seats these are unlikely to garner more than a handful of votes.
Only the organised political parties have the structure to get voters to the polls, even for a “non-event” by-election and there are no high-profile politicians at the moment who could feature strongly as an independent candidate.
The only two independent candidates to win seats since independence were already well-known within their constituencies and had a high national profile and even then they both only just scraped home.
The results of these by-elections would therefore not affect the make-up of Parliament. This would allow the parties and the principals to concentrate on getting things right for the next general election and perfecting the constitution and other required legislation.
Further amendments to the Electoral Act could be considered. At the moment a candidate needs just 10 nominations from voters on the roll for the constituency, a trivial number compared to the 40 000 names on each roll.
Zimbabwe, we think, should demand a bit more support from a serious candidate. The low number was set in the colonial era when there might have been well under 2 000 voters on a constituency roll.
The United States, which claims to champion democracy and acts as if it invented the system, makes it very difficult to be a candidate for any major office unless nominated by a party that garnered a significant percentage of the votes in the last election for that office in the state in question.
While rules vary between states, an independent candidate, or a candidate from a new party or a tiny party, usually needs tens of thousands
of signatures, and in some states hundreds of thousands, before the nomination is accepted.
This removes many of the nuisance candidates with no hope of getting more than a handful of votes, while still leaving the way open for a serious new political force that has wide popular support.
In many ways this is better than the system we use, copied from Britain, in expecting every candidate to post a deposit, refundable if they achieve 20 percent of the winner’s votes.
Even with high deposits rich men wanting a platform, or even to be known as a presidential or parliamentary candidate on their CVs, can buy a nomination, in effect, even if their only votes are from their immediate family.
At the same time over-high deposits make it hard for established parties, or even new parties, with substantial support to wage a proper campaign, since so much of their party funds are tied up in deposits.
So the by-elections need not be a diversion from the main goal of getting the next general election right, so long as the three principals and three main parties agree, need not be expensive and could even be used as a dry run in those consistencies where there is an independent standing to refine and hone legal requirements for candidates and test voting systems.
In fact, the country needs to hold elections now, get them out of the way and thereafter focus on developmental issues.
Online Reporter