A man walks past election poster of Zanu-PF party leader and Zimbabwe's president Emmerson Mnangagwa in Harare, Zimbabwe on 27 August, 2023. Zimbabwe's elections commission said Mnangagwa won the election over the Citizens Coalition for Change leader Nelson Chamisa. (Photo: EPA-EFE/Aaron Ufumeli) 
Zimbabwe has again failed to hold free, fair and credible elections. The country remains locked in a trajectory of disputed polls that will compound challenges for economic recovery. The elections again exposed widespread irregularities and a blatant disregard for the law and international voting standards.
Making no mention of the multiple aberrations identified by observer missions, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) declared incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) party the winner with 52.6%. Nelson Chamisa’s Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) got 44% of the vote.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Zimbabwean polls riddled with irregularities, say monitors as anxious nation awaits results amid protest fears
Disaggregated results aren’t available, and ZEC claims it isn’t obliged to make them public despite this being international best practice. Zanu-PF fell short of a two-thirds parliamentary majority but retained a comfortable majority with 136 seats. The CCC increased Parliament’s opposition seats to 73.
The ZEC announced the election results in record time, possibly to frustrate efforts to independently verify the count. The CCC rejected the outcome but withdrew its planned Constitutional Court challenge because “Zimbabwe’s courts were captured by Mnangagwa and Zanu-PF’, the party said. The playbook of bias in Zimbabwe’s courts, as seen in 2018 and in numerous election-related cases brought by the CCC, means that a court challenge would only legitimise Mnangagwa’s victory.
So, in a move reminiscent of the 2008 Robert Mugabe rushed inauguration after a discredited election, Mnangagwa is set to be inaugurated today.
SADC notes irregularities
Even the historically cautious Southern African Development Community (SADC) Electoral Observation Mission (Seom) couldn’t ignore the flouting of regulations and SADC principles. Its preliminary report found that the “rural vote may be compromised by alleged intimidation attributed to a group called Forever Associates Zimbabwe (FAZ), which is said to be a quasi-security intelligence organisation”.
It noted that “the Patriot Act is incompatible with the spirit of section 61(1) of the Constitution, and paragraph 4.1.2 of the SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections, which requires Member States to uphold, amongst others, the freedom of expression”. In response, Zanu-PF and the government have mounted a sustained campaign to shut down the Seom’s criticism. The African Union’s (AU) report also profiles widespread concerns but doesn’t pronounce on them as SADC does.
At the start of vote counting, the government halted independent observation by local civil society organisations (CSOs) when police raided the Zimbabwe Election Support Network and Election Resource Centre data centres, arrested staff and accredited local observers, and confiscated laptops and cellphones. The government says it had intelligence that some organisations intended to illegally announce results based on the CSOs’ parallel vote tabulation.
These actions shut down the Zimbabwe Election Support Network’s established independent Parallel Voter Tabulation process. Ironically, in the 2018 elections, both ZEC and the government used the parallel tabulations to corroborate the results.
Key election observer missions adjudged the polls as falling short of minimum standards. The SEOM’s unprecedented report was scathing, identifying a raft of procedural and process deficits at odds with the Zimbabwean constitution, Electoral Act and SADC’s Principles and Guidelines for Democratic Elections.
Read more in Daily Maverick: Zim activists slam Ramaphosa’s ‘premature’ endorsement of poll result, urge him to take action amid ‘abductions, killings’
The SADC mission noted ZEC’s lack of readiness, even though the commission had declared it was fully prepared. The mission found a lack of transparency around the voters’ roll, the contentious delimitation report, skewed access to state media, voter intimidation and deeper structural concerns including the conflation of party and state interests, the manipulation of the judiciary and problematic legislation.
Most of these issues have been recurring items in SADC reports on Zimbabwe’s elections in the past two decades. However, the mention of structural and systemic challenges reflects a break from the past, exposing various concerns that opposition and civil society have repeatedly raised.