Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on Friday predicted victory in presidential and parliamentary polls next month as he launched the election manifesto of his ruling Zanu-PF party.
”We certainly are going to win,” the 84-year-old leader told thousands of supporters at a rally in the capital, Harare.
”We of Zanu-PF have gathered here to mark the start, the official start of our march to another victory, another electoral victory.”
Zimbabweans go to the polls on March 29 to elect a president, legislators, senators and councillors.
Mugabe is hoping to secure a sixth term of office as leader of the former British colony he has ruled since independence in 1980.
The elections are to take place against a backdrop of economic meltdown in Zimbabwe, which has an official inflation rate of more than 100 000% — the highest in the world.
Zimbabwe’s last elections, won by Mugabe in 2002, were dismissed as rigged by Western observers and the opposition.
Mugabe is being challenged for the presidency by his former finance minister, Simba Makoni, since expelled from the ruling party, and main opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
‘I order you to vote for the president’
Meanwhile, the head of Zimbabwe’s prison service has ordered his officers to vote for Mugabe and said he will resign if the opposition wins next month’s election, official media reported on Friday.
Retired Major General Paradzayi Zimondi, who now heads the prison service, which is part of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, said he will retire to his farm if Tsvangirai or Makoni are elected to lead the country.
”I will only support the leadership of President Mugabe,” Zimondi was quoted by the state-owned Herald newspaper as saying while conferring new ranks to senior officers.
”I am giving you an order to vote for the president,” he told the officers.
On the eve of the 2002 presidential elections, the country’s defence forces chiefs, including Zimondi, said they would not recognise the presidency of anyone who did not participate in the country’s 1970s war of independence.
This was taken as a reference to Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist, who did not fight in the liberation war.
Zimbabwe’s senior military officers fought against white minority rule, and the opposition has in the past accused them of siding with 84-year-old Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980.
Mugabe has branded Makoni a political prostitute and Tsvangirai a puppet of former colonial power Britain and has promised a landslide victory to shame his Western critics. — AFP, Reuters