Zimbabwe: Mugabe To Give First Post-Polls Speech

Harare ---Zimbabwean President  Robert Mugabe is set to deliver his first public speech since he won the country’s election last week.

Mr Mugabe won 61 per cent of the vote against his closest contender, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai who got 34 per cent. Mr Tsvangirai has moved to court to demand a rerun of the “stolen election”.

Mugabe will address a Heroes Day celebration in the capital, Harare, on Monday 12 August 2013 to commemorate those who died during the country’s war of independence. Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party said it will boycott the event in protest of what it termed as massive vote rigging by ZANU-PF.

Thousands are expected to converge at various provincial and district centres countrywide for the celebrations, the Herald newspaper reported.

"Mugabe will lead the main celebrations at the National Heroes Acre in Harare with provincial governors officiating and reading his speech in the other nine provinces", it said. 

Heroes Day is marked annually in Zimbabwe, in commemoration to those who died during the 1970s struggle for independence. Mugabe will make his speech at the National Heroes Acre in the capital, the monument where some of those killed are buried.

The MDC party says it has strong evidence of electoral irregularities, which some regional and African monitors have praised as being peaceful but noted some irregularities.

In an appeal filed in the Constitutional Court on Friday in dispute of the presidential and parliamentary election results, lawyers for MDC party said they discovered some 870,000 names were duplicated on the voters list.

The Zimbabwe Election Support Network (Zesn), a local observer group reported that about one million voters mainly in urban areas - were "systematically disenfranchised" by being omitted from the voters' roll or turned away.

A nine-member Constitutional Court is expected to discuss the complaint this week and deliver verdict within the next two weeks.

Mugabe, 89, heads for a seventh term in office since the country gained independence from the UK in 1980. His swearing in awaits the verdict on the ongoing appeal.

Both Mugabe and Tsvangirai shared a troubled coalition government since 2009 under a power-sharing deal that ended violent clashes, following bungled elections. Mr Tsvangirai had won most votes in the first round of the 2008 poll, but pulled out of the run-off with Mr Mugabe because of attacks on his supporters, that left about 200 dead.