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THE SMART NEWS SOURCE | Feb 10 2012 23:03 | LAST UPDATED Feb 10 2012 23:03 |
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 President Robert Mugabe on Thursday predicted a landslide victory for his ruling party in elections that the opposition in Zimbabwe charged were not free and fair despite a campaign that broke away from the political violence of the past five years.
Looking cheerful and smiling, Mugabe dismissed opposition concerns of election fraud as "nonsense" and said he is "very confident, absolutely confident" of winning a two-thirds majority for his Zanu-PF party. "It's going to be a victory for us," said Mugabe, who turned up at a polling station at a Highfield township community hall accompanied by his wife, Grace, and young son Chatunga. "By how much, well, that is what we will see." "Everybody is seeing that these are free and fair elections," said the 81-year old veteran, Africa's last independence leader who is probably running his last elections ahead of his expected retirement in 2008. Sounding equally confident, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai turned up at a Harare school to cast his vote with his wife, Susan. "This is not going to be a free and fair election," said Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which is posing the strongest challenge yet to Zanu-PF's 25 years in power. "The people will speak today and I am hoping that the outcome will be an MDC victory, I have no doubts about that," Tsvangirai said. Missing opposition candidate found Meanwhile, an MDC candidate who went missing overnight in south-western Zimbabwe after being threatened by youths from Mugabe's Zanu-PF party has resurfaced, a spokesperson said on Thursday. Siyabonga Malandu disappeared in the southern town of Filabusi where local opposition leaders were holding a meeting on Wednesday evening to discuss preparations for the elections, said the MDC spokesperson for Matabeleland, Victor Moyo.  CONTINUES BELOW "At about 5.30pm, our polling agents together with the candidate were holding a deployment meeting when a Zanu-PF truck full of youths and war veterans and the Zanu-PF candidate Andrew Langa came and threatened to shoot them all," Moyo said. "We have now sent our security team to look for our candidate as well as his chief election agent as we believe his life could be in danger following threats by the Zanu-PF candidate to shoot him," he added. But Moyo later said that Malandu had come out of hiding after apparently running away from the assailants. "Malandu has now come out of hiding and is continuing with the job of deploying polling agents in the constituency. "The problem now is that some of the constituencies still do not have our election agents," said Moyo. Malandu is running against a sitting ruling-party candidate, Andrew Langa. Matabeleland, home to the minority Ndebeles and a hotbed of opposition to Zanu-PF, is one of the key battlegrounds. Almost half of the MDC candidates in the last elections were from that region. -- Sapa-AFP TOPICS IN THIS ARTICLE
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