Preventing Electoral Fraud report SAIRR May 11 ... - AfricanLiberty.org

The Diaspora
Zimbabwe faces an exceptional challenge to its democratic legitimacy in the form of its
enormous diaspora. No exact figures exist, but the estimate most often used is that some
four million of its citizens have fled abroad since the eruption of the country's political
crisis in 2000. The vast bulk of these exiles are in South Africa, though there are also
substantial Zimbabwean exile communities in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere. It is
very difficult to find other examples of countries where such substantial proportions of
the national community have been forced to flee.
The advent of democracy in Zimbabwe in 1980 was supposed to bring about the final
return of the large exile population that had accumulated in Mozambique, Tanzania and
elsewhere during the liberation struggle. It was also seen as crucial to the new
democracy that all these exiles should at last be able to exercise their right to vote in the
1980 poll. Yet now, thirty years after independence, a far larger exile group has been
created: a most unhappy historical achievement for a young country.
The need is now more pressing than ever to find a way of including Zimbabwe’s exiles in
the country’s democratic process. Naturally, one hopes that this would be part of a
transition which would encourage most or all of those exiles to return home.
Probably the best example to follow would be that of South Africa. In the first democratic
election there in 1994, the whole motif of the poll was that it should be inclusive and
great efforts were made to allow exiles to vote. To this end, the many hundreds of
thousands of residents who were not citizens but who enjoyed permanent residence status
were allowed to vote. This was a one-election-only privilege and thereafter citizens alone
were permitted to vote. Nonetheless, agitation continued to allow at least some of the
South African diaspora to vote. In 2009 their right to do so was finally upheld by the
Constitutional Court in Johannesburg.
Many other countries also allow such voting as a matter of course. Russia, for example,
allows any of its citizens who are abroad to vote in Russian elections by going to the
nearest Russian consulate or embassy to cast their vote.
Zimbabwe should clearly attempt to follow this model. It would, however, be
essential to conduct some preceding registration exercise at foreign embassies and
consulates. Here, exiles could prove their status by displaying their passports or IDs, and
could also attempt to establish their links to particular constituencies. Ideally, as in South
Africa in 1994, this would be a somewhat exceptional case: itself part of a large-scale
homewards return so that in succeeding elections the number of such diaspora voters
would diminish. There is, after all, no need to enfranchise those who have chosen to
reside permanently in other countries.
The founding election of democratic Zimbabwe in 1980 was badly flawed and there have
been no truly free and fair elections since then. What is now needed is nothing less than a
new founding election, this time one which inaugurates an era of truly free and fair
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