TINASHE MAKICHI
Actuarial scientist and First Mutual Holdings chief executive Douglas Hoto has come out to explain how the ruling party Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) managed to achieve massive vote margins in the just ended harmonised elections.
Hoto is also the chairman of Zimstat while more recently, he provided an expert opinion in Zanu PF’s defence against the case which had been brought before the Constitutional Court by MDC Alliance, which challenged the July 30 election presidential results. MDC Alliance expert opinion came from Kenyan statistician Outmbar Edgar Ouko.
He has over 22 years’ experience as an Actuary and has worked in various roles in the Insurance industry in Zimbabwe and the SADC region.
In an interview on FinX Live yesterday, Hoto for the first time ever after his involvement in the election case, said there is a general lack of understanding of the country’s population patterns and it is only through an organised structure from a cell level that political parties would be able to understand the dynamics.
“There was an argument that MDC Alliance pulled a massive crowd in Murehwa therefore announcing its grand entrance into Zanu PF strongholds. The argument would have been correct if MDC Alliance had structures in rural areas.
“If you understand the dynamics, then you would know ZANU PF party works from a cell which is a unit of 10 households and every registered voter there is a potential Zanu PF voter. So if you don’t have such a structure at that cell level, usually people who come to your rallies will be coming just to hear what you are saying or there are some who would have been brought from other parts of the country,” said Hoto.
“Unfortunately what happens is if you do a rally at the so called Freedom Square and you receive 100 000 and somebody does a rally at the National Sports Stadium and gets 60 000; by way of comparison the one who had 100 000 is said to have bigger chances of winning the election. But that is not how elections are won in real sense.”
Views on the Zimbabwe election landscape
Hoto said the Zimbabwe election landscape consists of 68,4 percent rural and 31,6 percent urban voters.
He added: “I got interested in the election petition from a mathematical perspective. What I did, was to simply deduce a conclusion from what the Kenyan statistician had observed when he alluded that in the strongholds of the two parties, Zanu PF would get 60-70 percent and MDC Alliance getting the balance and the reverse in the urban areas. So if you apply those ratios of 64,8 percent and multiply it by 65 percent and you will get between 51 and 54 percent in terms of the Presidential election votes,” said Hoto
The Nelson Chamisa led coalition challenged electoral results for 20 constituencies at the Electoral Court and the Chiredzi District vote was one of those disputed. The MDC Alliance rejected the results for the presidential election alleging that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission colluded with Zanu-PF to rig the elections.
Hoto however said there is general misunderstanding of the size of the Chiredzi District and the population that it carries.
“One interesting thing that happened in 2018 unlike the previous years, Uzumba Maramba-Pfungwe (UMP) was not the top voter and UMP used to be one constituency but its divided into two and the votes there were around 21 000 and the biggest single vote for the President was in Chiredzi North at 33 000 against 3 000 for the rest of the opposition.
“But to start with, you need to see how many people are in Chiredzi District as a whole and many people think this District is a small place and they think Triangle is in Chiredzi District and yet the District starts from where Bikita ends up to the Malipati Barder post and up to Ngundu to Save River. Chiredzi had 301 000 people at the last census count, so if you divide it into four constituencies it means a constituency has an average 75 000 and if you take adults who are about 50 percent of the people then you know you have at least 37 000 voters in a constituency,” said Hoto.
He noted that despite the excellent performance by Chiredzi District, Hurungwe remains the biggest district in terms of population with 350 000 people.
