Elections in Mali and Zimbabwe

As you may have worked out from the CIA's decision to deploy Chris Brown to Switzerland while Rihanna is in neighbouring Germany there are two big elections coming up in Africa this week. The first takes place in Mali on Sunday (29/7/13) and the second takes place in Zimbabwe on Wednesday (31/7/13).

The election is Mali is nothing more than a sick joke. The nation is still essentially in a state of war with the government and electoral commission unable to operate across great swathes of the north country and there are around 500,000 people who have been displaced by fighting within the country meaning they will be unable to vote. On top of that some bright spark has decided that this very poor and disorganised nation must provide each registered voter with an electronic ID card in order to allow them to vote. Rather predictably this system has been beset with problems from the start the main of which being that a vast number of registered voters have simply not being issued with ID cards. Nobody knows exactly how many registered voters have not been issued with an ID card but none of Mali's 300,000 registered 18 year olds will be allowed to vote. Of towns with adult populations over 1000 people 226 will receive no voter ID cards at all and in 406 towns only 0.5% of registered voters will only receive ID cards. This adds up to around 1 million voters who will be denied the right to take part in the election. On top of that you have obvious inconsistencies such as only 39 voter ID's being issued to Malians living in Morocco which is one of the main migration destinations for Malians emigrating. Finally the electoral commissions inability to reach the north of the country along with tensions with the ethnic Tuareg's which has seen election workers kidnapped means that a majority of voters that have not only been registered but also issued with ID cards will be denied the right to vote because no-one has given them their ID cards.

Therefore the intention of the Malian election seems quite simply to cause a disputed result with the majority of those in the north of the country excluded from the election. The hope is that this will cause a north/south split which will reignite tensions between the government based in the south and the Tuareg's based in the north. This means the civil war will start again creating the space for Islamist terrorists to restart their campaign just as the majority French troops leave and the less well trained African United Nations (UN) Peacekeeping force take over putting extreme pressure on the relatively weak African governments taking part.

As such my advice to Mali on it's election is to simply ignore it and its result. That's because regardless of who wins for the foreseeable future the nation is really going to be run by the UN and the French because they're the ones providing the troops.

Wednesday's election in Zimbabwe is going to be slightly more complicated because since the disputed 2005 election the two main parties have split. The ruling ZANU-PF has splintered with the emergence of ZAPU while the MDC has splintered to create the MDC-T which is a vehicle for Morgan Tsvangirai. ZAPU is supposed to represent an alternative for ZANU-PF voters who would rather do without the vendetta the west has against the ZANU-PF leader Robert Mugabe while the MDC is supposed to represent an alternative for MDC-T voters who could do without Morgan Tsvangirai who is largely seen as both a coward and a western stooge. However the two splinter parties are likely to cancel each other out leaving a close battle between ZANU-PF and the MDC-T.

The problem is that regardless of the actual result the MDC-T's western backers led by the UK intend to use the election as a way to overthrow Mugabe as they've been trying to do ever since Mugabe took Zimbabwe out of the UK Commonwealth. As such they've been spending a lot of money on foreign satellite TV channels to lay the groundwork for claims that ZANU-PF have stolen the election. For example it is around the time the Zimbabwean election result is scheduled to be announced we will discover if Shrien Dewani will appeal to the UK Supreme Court or accept his extradition to South Africa. As it is likely that ZANU-PF will legitimately win the election and Mugabe doesn't have a track record of taking defeat well any dispute over the election is likely to result in widespread violence. This will immediately result in a flood of Zimbabwean refugees into South Africa just as South Africa is trying to deal with the situation in Mali.

Therefore I think it would actually be better if ZANU-PF won Zimbabwe's election and for the opposition to respect that outcome regardless. That's because since the disputed 2005 election Zimbabwe has effectively been run by South Africa with both the economy and the political situation gradually improving. Therefore I think it would be better for this slow and gradual improvement to continue under the 89 year old Mugabe rather than having the nation plunged into chaos in an effort to hand the nation over to Tsvangirai who will have a lot of debts to pay amongst his foreign backers.

(Originally Posted) 23:45 on 27/7/13.