Mugabe cheats his way to win

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF appeared to have won the Zimbabwean election last night, amid allegations of widespread fraud and intimidation.

By evening, ZANU-PF had won 55 of the parliament’s 120 elected seats, compared to 34 for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe appoints an additional 30 seats, guaranteeing a majority for his party.

Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai accused the government of "disgusting, massive fraud".

As open army trucks patrolled the streets of central Harare, people clustered silently around TV sets in bars and electrical shops to watch live announcements of results.

The mood in the capital was subdued. Armed police manned roadblocks and searched car boots.

By lunchtime, election results were little more than lists of ZANU-PF victories. As state radio blared out in Bredfield Hair Salon along George Silundika Avenue, a group of men sat listening, their heads in their hands.

"The government has fraudulently once again betrayed the people," Mr Tsvangirai told a news conference.

"These elections cannot be accepted by anyone in their right mind," he said. "This is disgusting, massive fraud."

In a barely veiled signal to his followers in the MDC to take extra-parliamentary action to topple a government that has presided over seven years of economic collapse, widespread violence, massive unemployment and inflation, hunger and disease, he said: "I am asking people to defend their right to vote. We have been using the legal route and that route has failed. We are not going to use it this time."

Mr Tsvangirai was referring to the last parliamentary election in 2000 when, despite government violence which resulted in many deaths and countless maimings among the opposition, the MDC won 57 of the 120 parliamentary seats. In subsequent actions in the Supreme Court more than 20 ZANU PF victories were overturned as fraudulent, giving the MDC a parliamentary majority.

But the Supreme Court verdicts were held up for five years in the Appeal Court, staffed by judges loyal to Robert Mugabe who had been given properties confiscated from white commercial farmers in the post-2000 government-inspired upheavals. Those electoral appeals are still stuck in the Supreme Court and, following this general election, are now null and void.

Yesterday, the underground activists’ group Zvakwana (Enough is enough), which is fiercely critical of the government, sent out thousands of text messages asking "you gonna let them rig or you gonna chase them out?"

Prime among dissenting voices to Mr Mugabe has been that of Pius Ncube, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, who predicted the poll would be heavily rigged.

Before Easter Sunday mass last weekend in Bulawayo Cathedral, the Archbishop said: "I hope that people get so disillusioned that they really organise and kick him out by a non-violent, popular mass uprising.

"People should pluck up just a bit of courage and stand up against him and chase him away."

Men have been tried for treason for less in Zimbabwe, where it is a crime to insult President Mugabe. But Archbishop Ncube simply ignores what he regards as unjust laws. Just a few days earlier he said of the president: "He is a very, very evil man. The sooner he dies the better."

Mr Tsvangirai admitted impending defeat at a moment when the MDC had won 30 of the first 38 constituencies to declare. But they were all safe opposition seats in the three major urban centres of Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare. His MDC advisers decided they must pre-empt the final outcome when party supporters reported massive intimidation and ballot stuffing in rural Mashonaland and Masvingo, the heartland of traditional ZANU-PF support.

In an electorate of 5.7 million some one to two million "zombie votes" of dead people still on the ZANU-PF-controlled electoral register are believed to have been cast. Among those registered to vote on Thursday, for example, were three prominent MDC activists - Richard Tichaona Chiminya, Talent Mabika and David Stevens. But all three are dead, killed by senior ZANU-PF activists during the previous campaign.

Human rights organisations said the application of sheer fear was the most powerful weapon of electoral fraud, especially in rural areas, where there was a polling station for every 500 adults. Poverty-stricken peasants were warned by chiefs, who had been bribed with cash and four-wheel drive trucks, that their plots would be repossessed if a single MDC vote was found in the ballot boxes.

Speaking in London, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the elections were "seriously flawed" and charged that Mugabe had "yet again denied ordinary Zimbabweans a free and fair opportunity to vote, further prolonging the political and economic crisis he has inflicted on their country."

Last night, a South African parliamentary observer delegation was preparing to issue a statement declaring the election free and fair, as instructed in advance by South African president Thabo Mbeki.