Zimbabwe's opposition sought the services of a Kenyan Professor, Dr. Edgar Otumba Ouko, to help point out alleged irregularities in a case filed to challenge President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s victory.
Dr Ouko, who is an applied statistics professor at Maseno University, was contracted to justify claims by the MDC Alliance that the July 31 election was rigged.
In his affidavit, Dr Ouko prepared examples of double counting during the poll that the Chamisa-led outfit was relying on to question the poll credibility.
MDC Alliance maintained that it won the poll, accusing the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) of tampering with the vote count results which handed Mnangagwa a victory.
Chamisa went to court seeking the nullification of President Mnangagwa’s victory additionally, urging the court to declare him the winner.
He claimed that the election was not conducted in accordance with the law and was not “free and fair”.
In his response to the petition, President Mnangagwa insisted that the opposition’s petition was alleged to have mathematical anomalies which had no factual basis.
The Maseno University Professor, however, was not new to such petitions as he was engaged by Kenya’s opposition National Super Alliance (NASA) in its August 2017 presidential petition.
In the case, Dr. Ouko analysed what the opposition relied on as statistical irregularities in the Kenyan Presidential election.
The hearing of Zimbabwe’s presidential election petition is set for Wednesday, August 22.
President Mnangagwa won the election with 50.8 percent of the total vote against MDC Alliance’s Nelson Chamisa who got 44.3 percent.
