HARARE – Renowned South African legal pairing Advocate Dali Mpofu and Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi arrived in Harare on Friday to join MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa’s legal team seeking to overturn President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s disputed election victory.
The two lawyers join a formidable local legal team, led by Advocate Thabani Mpofu.
The Constitutional Court will begin hearing an election petition brought by Chamisa on Wednesday, August 22.
Chamisa says the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission fiddled numbers to hand incumbent Mnangagwa a narrow 50.8 percent victory in elections held on July 30.
In reply, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has admitted that there was data capturing errors, which when corrected would drop Mnangagwa to about 50.6 percent. Even then, the electoral body insists that Mnangagwa has met the 50 percent plus threshold required to win the poll.
Chamisa’s lawyers, however, say they will show systematic data manipulation by ZEC which will confirm that the 40-year-old opposition challenger in fact comfortably won the election.
