Delays in election results puts country on edge
Wednesday, 2 April, 2008
By late yesterday, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) had announced of the available 210 parliamentary seats the ruling ZANU-PF party had secured 68, the main opposition party, Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) had won 67, while a breakaway faction of the MDC had picked up five seats.
But although there has been no official word on the results of the three way presidential battle, pitting Mugabe, Tsvangirai and former finance minister Simba Makoni for the highest office, there is already speculation that the race will enter a second round.
The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), a nongovernmental electoral monitoring organisation, is predicting a run off presidential ballot, after none of the three candidates secured more than 50 percent of the vote cast. To avoid a second round one of the candidates is required to obtain at least 51 percent of the vote.
On Tuesday night senior military and political sources told IRIN that an all party meeting was being held to try and work out a power sharing deal that would allow Mugabe to exit with dignity.
Bargaining
Tsvangirai, said to be leading the presidential race, has postponed three press conferences in the past two days where he was apparently set to declare victory, and has, according to sources, been bargaining with an embattled Mugabe.
According to ZESN, chairman, Noel Kututwa, whose organisation collated results posted on polling stations following each count, Tsvangirai, was projected to garner 49.4 percent, Mugabe was set to receive 41.8 percent, while Makoni was projected to have 8.2 percent of the presidential vote.
"While it is the responsibility of ZEC to announce the official results of the election, it is the legal duty of election observers to provide the people of Zimbabwe with independent nonpartisan information on all aspects of the electoral process," Kututwa said.
The slow release of parliamentary results, the absolute silence surrounding the outcome of the presidential ballot and the increasing presence of police and army personel on the streets of the capital Harare, has led to mounting fears of vote rigging and the belief that the government was preparing to declare a state of emergency.
The Crisis Coalition, an umbrella body of civil organizations, has made an urgent petition to the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a regional body, and the African Union to pressure Mugabe to respect the will of the people and to speedily announce the elelction results.
State of emergency
Coalition spokesperson, MacDonald Lewanika said: "Of significant concern are unconfirmed reports that the incumbent president is preparing to declare a state of emergency after announcing inaccurate results.
"This is consistent with the threats made by the security chiefs before elections that they are not prepared to accept the election results if President Mugabe and ZANU-PF lose the elections," he said.
The SADC Observer Mission have already given the elections a clean bill of health. European Union and United States observers were prevented from overseeing the poll.
However, in declaring the elections as credible, SADC said they were concerned about the bias against the opposition by the state media, threatening statements by the military, the presence of police officers in the polling stations and the use of public resources for party political business.
The Zimbabwe Human Rights Nongovernmental Organisation Forum, a body advocating human rights, said the SADC Observer Mission's statement that the election was "an expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe" was premature.
"An election is a process, not an event, which is only concluded when the results have been communicated to and accepted by the electorate. The electorate remains uninformed about the bulk of the results long after polls were closed and votes counted," the human rights forum said in a statement.
Irine Petras, the director of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, said the ZEC has been acting outside its electoral mandate by announcing parliamentary results.
"Results of the House of Assembly were announced and displayed at constituency centres. It is the presidential results which ZEC should be announcing," Petras said.
ZANU-PF and MDC officials told IRIN that Mugabe was delaying the release of the presidential results and had deployed the military and the police onto the streets as a bargaining tool.
The Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA), said the elections process had fallen far short of democratci standards.
"The mission found the electoral process to be severely wanting in respect of fairness as most of the critical aspects of the process lacked transparency," EISA said in a statement.