JUSTICE IN ZIMBABWE 105 ____________________________________________________________________ commercial farming land” and “crowded, tired and overgrazed communal lands” with five Christian mission stations that appear to “sanctify this land imbalance”. However justified this description may be, it did not derive from the evidence led at the hearing of the petition. Although, as pointed out earlier, it may be unfair to criticise a judge’s assessment of evidence without having seen the record, the judgment of Hlatshwayo J suggests that he subjected the evidence given by petitioners’ witnesses to unduly narrow scrutiny, and that he was unduly hasty in dismissing it. For example, evidence was given that two MDC supporters were abducted, taken to an occupied ranch and assaulted so severely that one of them subsequently died. The judge considered that their “horrendous experience” arose from an earlier shooting incident between supporters of the two parties and dismissed it on the ground that it “does not seem to have had anything to do with compelling anybody to vote or refrain from voting”. On much the same ground he dismissed a “horrific incident” in which MDC supporters were taken from their car to an occupied farm where they were brutally assaulted: “all the court could make of this incident was that [it and another incident] were horrific criminal acts engendered or exacerbated by political polarisation and the misguided carrying of dangerous weapons.” And one of the grounds which the judge gave for disbelieving a witness who alleged he was assaulted was that the witness had given a “flimsy” reason for his failure to report the matter to the police, namely that a junior officer had chased him away from the police station. It does not sound a flimsy reason. In some other election petitions judges have taken what appears to be an unduly narrow view of the law. For example, in the Mwenezi and Mt Darwin South Election Petitions162, Makarau J held that the offence of undue influence as described in s 105 of the Electoral Act is narrowly cast in that the influence must be directed at a particular person and not at the electorate at large; hence it does not cover the setting up of illegal road-blocks and other acts that are unacceptable in a democratic society. On this reading of the law, general violence cannot amount to undue influence for the purposes of s 105 of the Act. In the Chinhoyi election petition, Matamisa v Chiyangwa & Anor163, Garwe J held that proof beyond a reasonable doubt is required to show that a candidate or his agent has been guilty of a corrupt practice under Part XX of the Electoral Act. In previous cases it has been said that electoral offences must