Zimbabwe: Fears of Rigged Election Increase

From the deserted streets of Bulawayo to the fetid slums of Mbare, Zimbabwe was waiting on tenterhooks last night to discover the fate of President Mugabe as he appeared to be heading towards election defeat.

With official counts trickling out of Harare, the clamour grew for the authorities to tell the people what they already knew from their own polling stations: that for the old tyrant, the writing was on the wall.

Lists posted outside each station announced the scale of the swing to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which scooped up the figures from teams of observers to declare that it was bound for a landslide victory in parliamentary and presidential polls.

The MDC said that its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was outpacing his old adversary by two to one, leading the presidential race with 60 per cent of the vote with almost two-thirds of constituencies counted. In the parliamentary poll Cabinet ministers were set to lose their seats.

The sluggish pace of official results heightened fears that a massive fraud was under way to keep Mr Mugabe clinging to power. By the end of the day the handful of results released showed his Zanu (PF) party taking 31 seats and the opposition 35 in the 210-seat Parliament. Significant scalps included the Justice Minister, Patrick Chinamasa. No official results have been released in the presidential race.

Curiously, each update of the results showed the two parties running neck and neck. “Someone is playing games here,” a researcher for an election watchdog said. “These are not the first results as they randomly become available, as it should be. It looks like someone is deliberately spacing them in a crude attempt to placate suspicion.”