BATANAI MATSIKA
Wednesday August 22, 2018, the Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe (Con-Court) sat to hear a petition filed by MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa, who is seeking to reverse President-elect Emmerson Mnangagwa’s win in the recent presidential elections.
The court will commence the hearing of the presidential challenge with a verdict likely by the end of the week.
In his application, Chamisa claims to have won the election with 60 percent of the vote. According to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), he got 44.3% while Mnangagwa got 50.8 percent.
Meanwhile, ZEC has admitted that there were some “clerical errors” and has revised its figures stating that Chamisa now has 44.39 percent while Mnangagwa now stands at 50.6 percent.
The issue of contested elections has been a major concern and also counter-productive in many African countries.
For example, in Kenya’s 2017 elections, a flawed electronic voting system and the disputed role of the country’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) led to a dramatic Supreme Court annulment of the vote and the order of a rerun.
The application of blockchain technology in the voting system could provide an idealistic solution to the problem of rigged elections.
According to Don & Alex Tapscott (Authors of Blockchain Revolution 2016), blockchain is an incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.
This means that information held on a blockchain exists as a shared — and continually reconciled — database. The main advantage is that the blockchain database is not stored in any single location implying that all records it keeps are truly public and easily verifiable. Further, no centralised version of this information exists for a hacker to corrupt or manipulate the information thus increasing transparency.
Under a blockchain electoral voting system, voters would check that their ballot had been correctly cast and registered with the electoral body in an open-source, peer-reviewed system.
The major constraint, however, is that corrupt regimes in a number of African countries may not necessarily want to embrace such technologies. For example, the expansion of blockchain cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin has been shunned upon.
In Zimbabwe, the Central Bank (RBZ) has ordered finance houses to stop processing virtual currency payments and this has thrown the country’s leading crypto currency exchange platform Golix, into disarray.
Overall, we believe regulators have, to a large extent, blocked and slowed dramatically the adoption of decentralised technologies like blockchain.
This could set countries in Africa back in terms of advancing their positions as innovative hubs and ability to drive growth and development.
Author – Batanai Matsika Head of Research – Akribos Research Services +263 78 358 4745 batanai@akriboscapital.com
