Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was re-elected and secured the two-thirds majority his party needs to change the constitution as his main rival urged African leaders to overturn what he said was a fraudulent vote.
Mugabe, 89, got more than 61 percent in the ballot to extend his 33-year rule, according to results from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission today. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who won 34 percent, said he wants a forensic probe of the July 31 vote, mainly of the voters roll and ballot papers, and will submit a dossier of fraud to the African Union and Southern African Development Community.
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front last had a parliamentary majority after 2005 elections and has shared power with Tsvangirai since 2009 following a disputed poll marked by violence. The main local monitoring team, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, said balloting in last month’s vote was “seriously compromised.” The AU and SADC, which sent the biggest international observer teams, endorsed the elections as largely free and fair.
The Movement for Democratic Change will use the courts to force a fresh election and won’t participate in any government or state institutions until that happens, Tsvangirai told reporters in the capital, Harare, today. “We didn’t lose this election,” he said. “Instead of celebrating there is national mourning.”
[h=2]Empowerment Push[/h]Zanu-PF won 160 of the 210 seats in parliament, compared with 49 for the MDC and one seat for an independent candidate, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said in a statement distributed in Harare. Two constituencies will be recounted on Aug. 6-7. Mugabe got 2.11 million votes, compared with Tsvangiria’s 1.17 million, it said.
Zanu-PF received a mandate to govern and will proceed without the MDC if they boycott the government, Defense Minister Emerson Mnangagwa told reporters.
The international community must “respect the people of Zimbabwe,” Mnangagwa said. “We are now going to implement our indigenization and empowerment policy as a guideline to guide and govern for the next five years.”
Mugabe and Zanu-PF have forced mining companies such as Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd. and Anglo American Platinum Ltd. to cede a majority share of their local assets to black Zimbabweans or the government. The southern African nation has the world’s second-biggest platinum and chrome reserves as well as deposits of diamonds, gold and coal. Tsvangirai has promised to repeal the measure.
[h=2]Turned Away[/h]Zimbabwe Electoral Commission member Mkhululi Nyathi quit over the manner in which the elections were conducted, the Harare-based Newsday newspaper reported today, citing his resignation letter. Commission spokesman Shupikai Mashereni declined to comment.
Tsvangirai, 61, made a series of complaints against the election, saying thousands of people were turned away from polling stations because they weren’t on the electoral roll, voters were bused to cast ballots outside their home areas and the election process was controlled by the security forces.
“It’s a classic case of electoral authoritarianism, where elections are used but only to legitimize the regime,” Judy Smith-Hohn, foreign policy analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said yesterday by phone from Pretoria.
The head of the AU observer mission, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, said incidents during the election didn’t invalidate the vote. “The election is free” and “fairly credible,” he told reporters.
[h=2]Endorsing Election[/h]Speaking for SADC, Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe said that while the vote was “free and peaceful” the regional body hadn’t determined if it was fair. In a separate interview, Membe said, “we are endorsing the elections.”
“The focus was on whether the vote was peaceful, not whether it was a proper election,” said Smith-Hohn. “The credibility of SADC and the AU as neutral observers is seriously called into question” if they back the outcome without grievances of the MDC and others being investigated.
The local monitoring group, which had almost 10 times as many observers as the AU and SADC, said as many as 1 million voters in the MDC’s urban strongholds were left off the voters roll.
“Before election day the voter registration process was systematically biased against urban voters,” the Zimbabwean monitoring group said in an e-mailed statement on Aug. 1. “A total of 99.97 percent of rural voters were registered versus only 67.94 percent of urban voters.”
[h=2]‘Highly Compromised’[/h]The “credibility, legitimacy, free and fair conduct” of the elections and “their reliability as the true expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe have been highly compromised,” a body of non-governmental groups from around SADC, which deployed 150 observers to mainly rural areas said in an Aug. 2 statement.
The MDC “has to look at its shortcomings,” Gwinyayi Dzinesa, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said yesterday in a phone interview from Harare. “Regardless of the election irregularities, Zanu-PF did its homework.”
The rejection of the vote by Tsvangirai followed a campaign largely free of the violence in the last Mugabe-Tsvangirai contest in 2008.
That year, Tsvangirai led the first round of the election before he pulled out of a run-off, saying that about 200 of his supporters had been killed. The MDC beat Zanu-PF in the parliamentary ballot. The 15-nation SADC negotiated a power-sharing agreement in 2009, leaving Mugabe as president and Tsvangirai as prime minister.
To contact the reporters on this story: Vernon Wessels in Johannesburg at [email protected]; Franz Wild in Johannesburg at [email protected]; Godfrey Marawanyika in Harare at [email protected]; Brian Latham in Harare at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Vernon Wessels at [email protected]
Mugabe, 89, got more than 61 percent in the ballot to extend his 33-year rule, according to results from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission today. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who won 34 percent, said he wants a forensic probe of the July 31 vote, mainly of the voters roll and ballot papers, and will submit a dossier of fraud to the African Union and Southern African Development Community.
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front last had a parliamentary majority after 2005 elections and has shared power with Tsvangirai since 2009 following a disputed poll marked by violence. The main local monitoring team, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, said balloting in last month’s vote was “seriously compromised.” The AU and SADC, which sent the biggest international observer teams, endorsed the elections as largely free and fair.
The Movement for Democratic Change will use the courts to force a fresh election and won’t participate in any government or state institutions until that happens, Tsvangirai told reporters in the capital, Harare, today. “We didn’t lose this election,” he said. “Instead of celebrating there is national mourning.”
[h=2]Empowerment Push[/h]Zanu-PF won 160 of the 210 seats in parliament, compared with 49 for the MDC and one seat for an independent candidate, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission said in a statement distributed in Harare. Two constituencies will be recounted on Aug. 6-7. Mugabe got 2.11 million votes, compared with Tsvangiria’s 1.17 million, it said.
Zanu-PF received a mandate to govern and will proceed without the MDC if they boycott the government, Defense Minister Emerson Mnangagwa told reporters.
The international community must “respect the people of Zimbabwe,” Mnangagwa said. “We are now going to implement our indigenization and empowerment policy as a guideline to guide and govern for the next five years.”
Mugabe and Zanu-PF have forced mining companies such as Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd. and Anglo American Platinum Ltd. to cede a majority share of their local assets to black Zimbabweans or the government. The southern African nation has the world’s second-biggest platinum and chrome reserves as well as deposits of diamonds, gold and coal. Tsvangirai has promised to repeal the measure.
[h=2]Turned Away[/h]Zimbabwe Electoral Commission member Mkhululi Nyathi quit over the manner in which the elections were conducted, the Harare-based Newsday newspaper reported today, citing his resignation letter. Commission spokesman Shupikai Mashereni declined to comment.
Tsvangirai, 61, made a series of complaints against the election, saying thousands of people were turned away from polling stations because they weren’t on the electoral roll, voters were bused to cast ballots outside their home areas and the election process was controlled by the security forces.
“It’s a classic case of electoral authoritarianism, where elections are used but only to legitimize the regime,” Judy Smith-Hohn, foreign policy analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said yesterday by phone from Pretoria.
The head of the AU observer mission, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, said incidents during the election didn’t invalidate the vote. “The election is free” and “fairly credible,” he told reporters.
[h=2]Endorsing Election[/h]Speaking for SADC, Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe said that while the vote was “free and peaceful” the regional body hadn’t determined if it was fair. In a separate interview, Membe said, “we are endorsing the elections.”
“The focus was on whether the vote was peaceful, not whether it was a proper election,” said Smith-Hohn. “The credibility of SADC and the AU as neutral observers is seriously called into question” if they back the outcome without grievances of the MDC and others being investigated.
The local monitoring group, which had almost 10 times as many observers as the AU and SADC, said as many as 1 million voters in the MDC’s urban strongholds were left off the voters roll.
“Before election day the voter registration process was systematically biased against urban voters,” the Zimbabwean monitoring group said in an e-mailed statement on Aug. 1. “A total of 99.97 percent of rural voters were registered versus only 67.94 percent of urban voters.”
[h=2]‘Highly Compromised’[/h]The “credibility, legitimacy, free and fair conduct” of the elections and “their reliability as the true expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe have been highly compromised,” a body of non-governmental groups from around SADC, which deployed 150 observers to mainly rural areas said in an Aug. 2 statement.
The MDC “has to look at its shortcomings,” Gwinyayi Dzinesa, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said yesterday in a phone interview from Harare. “Regardless of the election irregularities, Zanu-PF did its homework.”
The rejection of the vote by Tsvangirai followed a campaign largely free of the violence in the last Mugabe-Tsvangirai contest in 2008.
That year, Tsvangirai led the first round of the election before he pulled out of a run-off, saying that about 200 of his supporters had been killed. The MDC beat Zanu-PF in the parliamentary ballot. The 15-nation SADC negotiated a power-sharing agreement in 2009, leaving Mugabe as president and Tsvangirai as prime minister.
To contact the reporters on this story: Vernon Wessels in Johannesburg at [email protected]; Franz Wild in Johannesburg at [email protected]; Godfrey Marawanyika in Harare at [email protected]; Brian Latham in Harare at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Vernon Wessels at [email protected]