17 Recommendations: The evidence to date suggests that a number of immediate steps should be taken. Obviously, the most important, from the NCA’s perspective, is to address the serious flaws in the constitutional and legal framework governing these elections: when the enabling environment is deeply flawed, it is doubtful that any election can be treated seriously. However, apart from these concerns, it is evident that there remain many other serious problems, and these also relate to the enabling environment, the so-called “freeness” component of the SADC Principles and Guidelines. Our preliminary findings give enormous cause for concern, and, accordingly, we make the following recommendations: • • • • • There must be immediate steps to remove all partisan forces from the existing constituencies. This applies particularly to the war veterans and the youth militia. Here the NCA would point out that the associations between these groups and significant irregularities are sufficiently serious to warrant immediate action. There must be immediate steps to set in place an enforceable code of conduct for these elections. Whilst both parties are implicated in electoral irregularities, the balance of the evidence to date suggests that ZanuPF is the major culprit, and the NCA would call upon the Government to take immediate steps both to restrain its supporters and to call for a consultation between all political parties on the setting up of an enforceable code of conduct. In view of the large number of allegations of partisan behaviour by the law enforcement and security agencies, there must be immediate and public action by the Government to ensure the compliance with these agencies with the Constitution and the Statute law of Zimbabwe. The NCA calls upon the Government to ensure that all allegations of partisan behaviour on the part of these agencies are quickly investigated and publicly dealt with through the courts. The complete absence of voter education, especially when these elections are being run under a new dispensation, is a near-fatal flaw, and underlines the reasons for the NCA repudiating these elections. The allegations of partisan access to food are deeply disturbing, especially in the context of a serious humanitarian crisis. The NCA calls upon the Government to immediately take steps to ensure that no political party has any access to the possibility of providing food relief, and to publicly demonstrate to all that food relief is non-partisan. It is doubtful that the election climate described above can change much in the coming weeks, but the NCA will withhold its judgement that the “freeness” component of the forthcoming election has been fatally damaged. The NCA will issue a final pre-election report immediately prior to the poll, which will summarise the developments during March 2005, as well as the whole pre-election climate. A note on methodology As is indicated below, the NCA is a national network of member organizations and members. This national network allows the NCA to sample opinion around the country, and this has allowed the NCA to develop the methodology behind the Election Climate Reporting system. A standardized reporting format was developed for this system, which consists of the 8 areas, or “election atmospherics” that are indicated at the beginning of the report: National Constitutional Assembly: Election Climate Reports.