OWN CORRESPONDENT, Harare | Thursday
ZIMBABWES main opposition party lost a third legal battle Wednesday in its bid to have courts nullify the outcomes in 37 constituencies in last year’s parliamentary elections, a party representative said.
The latest ruling is the third loss for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which has won three cases while three have been dropped.
Both the MDC and President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) plan to appeal to the Supreme Court the cases they lose.
MDC representative Learnmore Jongwe said his party was still waiting for a copy of the ruling in the latest case, but that High Court Judge Paddington Garwe had issued his ruling that ZANU-PF candidate Phillip Chiyangwa had duly won the race for the Chinhoyi district.
The MDC had accused the flashy businessman Chiyangwa of vote-buying, saying that he had run advertisements urging people to vote for him in exchange for money.
The MDC, which was formed on the backbone of the labour movement in 1999, took 56 of the 120 elected seats in parliament last June, while 63 went to President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF.
Parliament also includes 30 seats whose holders are essentially presidential appointees.
Included among the three cases that MDC has won is the race lost by its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai.
Justice James Devittie, who handed down that decision, has resigned from the bench, effective in November, after serving for five years.
The opposition went to court charging that Mugabe’s party’s win in last June’s vote was compromised by widespread violence and fraud, much of it blamed on self-styled independence war veterans.
Dozens of people were killed and many were beaten in poll-related incidents and invasions of white-owned commercial farmland as part of a controversial land seizure and redistribution programme. – AFP
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