Friends, voters, countrymen!

South Africa’s elections are coming, and voter registration days have been scheduled for 8 and 9 November.
This is a great opportunity to help contribute to your democracy.
When: 8am – 5pm on Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 November
Where: at your nearest voting station
Check out the Independent Electoral Commission’s website for more details.

Zim unity government: Thabo’s toxic legacy

Part of Thabo Mbeki’s toxic legacy could well prove to be the disastrous unity deal he engineered between Zanu-PF and the MDC in Zimbabwe.
Democracy has been defeated in Zimbabwe, and this largely due to Mbeki’s willingness to legitimise Mugabe’s tyrannous regime through his chairing of the power-sharing negotiations. It was a marriage doomed from the [...]

Hitting the right note with the electorate

The official opposition has called for the upcoming general elections to be scrapped and for them to be replaced with Politics Idols – a singing competition with one singer participating from each political party. This comes after Helen Zille’s stirring performance (accompanied with spirited boogieing) of Never give up, the DA’s new anticrime song, outside [...]

Make newspaper text bigger… or else!

His excellency the President of Zim’s sight has got so bad that he can no longer read newspapers. In an article on NewZimbabwe.com it is revealed that Mugabe has demanded that the font-size of state-owned papers be increased. As if that would give him any clue about what’s really going on!
Ndlovu told state media editors [...]

A party by any other name …

A tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the DA was in desperate need of a branding overhaul was met with a broad spectrum of responses — from “DA who?” to indignant rebuttals from DA activists.
The reality of the situation is that that the official opposition is severely stigmatised. Negative emotions towards the party — from mistrust to hatred [...]

Zimbabwean quote of the day II

“The moment the people stop supporting you, then that’s the moment you should quit politics.”
ROBERT MUGABE
Source: www.cathybuckle.com
If only he were to follow his own advice…
With the release of the presidential election results suspended, a storm is brewing. Has the past few days been Zimbabwe’s “Prague Spring”? Things don’t look good; but should Mugabe and [...]

Where to now for the billion-dollar banana republic?

The Zimbabwean election results took me by surprise. And what a wonderful surprise it was!
I had overestimated the ability of the entire Zanu-PF state apparatus to rig an election. But clearly their ineptitude got the better of them – or perhaps the people in power knew that change was inevitable so they ended up doing [...]

Zimbabwean quote of the day

“We are not in the habit of rigging… We don’t rig elections. I cannot sleep with my conscience if I have rigged.”
ROBERT MUGABE
Source: The UK’s Sunday Telegraph.
Is he a liar or just delusional? Perhaps all he’s saying is that he’s an insomniac. Or that he doesn’t sleep with his conscience. Ah, [...]

Friends, Zimbabweans, countrymen!

The e-card above from Sokwanele says it all. To the Zimbabweans that remain in their beloved country – get out to the polls and vote!
The cynic in me says that to do so would be pointless. After all, the government and its shadowy accoutrements are desperate to cling to power and will do anything possible [...]

Google Maps to show Zim election abuses

This morning I got a press release from Sokwanele (“enough is enough”), the Zimbabwe Civic Action Support Group that is campaigning for freedom and democracy in Zimbabwe. The release outlines how Google Maps is being used on their site to show where electoral code breaches (from gerrymandering and vote buying to abduction and murder) [...]