Zimbabwe’s opposition claimed a clear lead over President Robert Mugabe and his party as pressure mounted on Monday evening for the swift announcement of full results from presidential and parliamentary polls.
Riot police patrolled the capital, Harare, as the first official returns trickled in, placing Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party slightly behind challenger Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the legislative election.
The opposition charged that delays in releasing full results from Saturday’s ballots were part of a bid to help Mugabe prolong his 28-year rule as foreign governments and an observer mission called for the process to be speeded up.
“The people have spoken against the dictatorship,” MDC general secretary Tendai Biti told a press conference. “We are anxiously waiting for the final results. We pray that there will not be recreation and re-engineering of the people’s will.”
Earlier on Monday, the United Kingdom-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) said that Mugabe and Zanu-PF were to announce victory in the elections, according to unofficial results leaked from the Zanu-PF and Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) command centres.
Sources within the ZEC centre said Mugabe had clearly lost the election to Tsvangirai, polling only 20% of the vote.
According to Zanu-PF sources at the collation centre as well as government sources, the ZEC was to announce that the ruling party had won by 111 seats, or 52%, with some rural constituencies recording huge victories for Mugabe.
The IWPR could not provide the exact percentage by which Mugabe would “win”, but its sources said there would not be a run-off, as Zanu-PF would claim Mugabe had clinched more than 50% of the total number of votes cast.
The MDC’s own tally of votes in 128 of the 210 parliamentary seats showed that its leader, Tsvangirai, had secured 60% of votes against 30% for Mugabe in the presidential race. The party also calculated that it had won 96 out of the same constituencies, with only 106 needed for an overall majority in Parliament.
The opposition’s increasingly bold claims flew in the face of warnings by the authorities not to pre-empt the official verdict.
Also, a projection from the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, a coalition of NGOs, said that while Tsvangirai would get more votes (49,4%) than Mugabe (41,8%), he would not win in the first round.
If no candidate gets more than 50%, a run-off must be held within three weeks.
Delay in results
The MDC has said it decided to announce its own results because it has little trust in the ZEC, a supposedly independent body whose executive is appointed by Mugabe.
The ZEC, which has called for patience, announced its first results on Monday morning, nearly 36 hours after polls had closed. In the first 66 constituencies to be declared, the MDC was said to have won 35 seats and Zanu-PF 31.
One of the most notable early casualties was Mugabe’s outgoing justice minister, who lost his seat in the rural Makoni Central constituency.
As hours passed between the announcement of different batches of results, the European Union and former colonial power Britain called for announcements to be speeded up. “The … eyes of the world are on Zimbabwe, wanting to be sure that everything is done fairly and everything is done in the right way,” said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, urging “that the results come forward soon.”
United States State Department spokesperson Tom Casey said the US was “concerned by the slow pace of the official tabulation”, urging the ZEC “to release the entire election results, including the presidential election returns, as quickly as possible”.
Fearing the kind of bloodshed that followed Kenya’s disputed elections in January, security services have been placed on alert throughout the country and riot police armed with batons and shields were seen patrolling the capital.
After determining the 2002 election was rigged, no representatives from EU countries or the US have been allowed to oversee the ballot.
But while one regional team of observers gave it a relatively clean bill of health, a team from the Pan African Parliament (PAP) expressed concern both about the results delay and over government handouts to win over voters.
“While the mission appreciates that the government in power has certain obligations towards improving the welfare of the citizenry, it nevertheless believes the timing of such generosity was unfortunate,” PAP spokesperson Marwick Khumalo said.
As well as Tsvangirai, Mugabe is up against former finance minister Simba Makoni, who is expected to trail in third.
The elections come as Zimbabwe grapples with an inflation rate of more than 100 000% and widespread shortages of even basic foodstuffs such as bread and cooking oil.
Mugabe (84), Africa’s oldest leader, has blamed the economic woes on the EU and the US, which imposed sanctions on his inner circle after he was accused of rigging his 2002 re-election.