President Robert Mugabe is under growing pressure to recognise defeat in Zimbabwe’s presidential election as the opposition held talks with military and security officials on Tuesday. Mugabe’s security cabinet had on Sunday decided not to recognise defeat after being forewarned that he had lost the vote.
Robert Mugabe on Monday was desperately trying to cling to power, despite his clear defeat in Zimbabwe’s presidential election, by blocking the electoral commission from releasing official results and threatening to treat an opposition claim of victory as a coup.
Will Mugabe accept the result? Zimbabweans didn’t so much speak in Saturday’s presidential election as shout so overwhelmingly that Robert Mugabe and the Zanu-PF party elite who came to believe in their unchallenged right to rule have been stunned into silence.
Robert Mugabe was desperately trying to cling to power on Sunday night, despite his clear defeat in Zimbabwe’s presidential election, by blocking the electoral commission from releasing official results and threatening to treat an opposition claim of victory as a coup.
To Robert Mugabe, Saturday’s presidential election in Zimbabwe is not so much a vote as war. From his campaign slogan — Get Behind the Fist — to speeches invoking the liberation war against white rule, the president of Zimbabwe has defined his campaign to extend his 28-year rule as the final struggle against British imperialism.
The numbers ceased to mean much to Sarah Chekani about the time inflation in Zimbabwe surged past 50Â 000% late last year. It has doubled again since then, but that hardly matters to Chekani and others like her who survive in an orbit touched only fleetingly by cash or the spiralling exchange rate.
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/ 19 November 2007
"This thing of rape," said Colonel Edmond Ngarambe, shifting uneasily on his wooden bench high in the mountains of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, "I can’t deny that happens. We are human beings. But it’s not just us. The Mai Mai, the government soldiers who are not paid, the Rastas do the same thing. And some people sent by our enemies do it to cause anger against us."
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/ 6 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki remains an ”Aids dissident” who has told a biographer that he regrets bowing to pressure from his Cabinet to ”withdraw from the debate” over the disease ravaging South Africa. According to a long-awaited biography by Mark Gevisser, the president feels aggrieved that he was deflected from continuing to question the causes of the epidemic.
South Africa has blamed Britain for the deepening crisis in Zimbabwe by accusing the United Kingdom of leading a campaign to ”strangle” the beleaguered African state’s economy and saying it has a ”death wish” against a negotiated settlement that might leave Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF in power.
Togara Sanyatwe was buried in the West Park cemetery on the edge of Bulawayo at 83 years of age. The headstone reveals nothing more about his life, but he would already have been considered an elder of his community at the time those who now lie around him were being born. They include Zah Zah Ngwenya, who was just 28 at the time of her death on the same day as Sanyatwe.