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The Last Kicks of a Dying Horse
What a dramatic two days this has been. With voting over in the
allotted 12
hours, counting has taken another 72 hours and in some cases the
Zimbabwe
Electoral Commission is still verifying the vote results. In a dramatic
development the political masters in Zanu PF tried to force ZEC to
declare
Mugabe the winner with 53 per cent of the vote and a Zanu PF majority
of 115
seats.
This information was sent to us by elements in Zanu PF and we made the
plan
public at a press conference at 10.00 hrs today. But once again the ZEC
has
come up trumps - they refused to gerrymander the results and are
slowly
releasing the final results to the public. This appears to be an effort
to
give the Zanu PF people a chance to 'clean house' in advance of
what will be
a fairly rapid transfer of power once the final figures for the
Presidential
election are announced.
It would seem that the last minute desperate measures to frustrate a
MDC
victory was made late yesterday and last night but has faded by this
morning. The best indication of that is that the heavy police presence
evident last night has faded and there are no police or army units on
the
street today.
So at last it looks as if the ZEC will eventually announce that Morgan
Tsvangirai has won this election - I personally expect the final ZEC
tally
to be 58 per cent for Morgan Tsvangirai, 27 per cent for Mugabe and 15
per
cent for Simba Makoni. I also expect that the final tally in terms of
the
Parliamentary seats will be 115 for MDC, 12 for the Mutambara group, 8
independents and 75 for Zanu PF. It is clear that many of the Zanu PF
seats
were in fact rigged in their favor but ZEC is accepting this as it was
what
I call 'micro rigging' - in the sense that they manipulated the
numbers of
people voting.
There were many ways in which they could do this - threats against
the
population - 'vote Zanu PF or else', multiple voting in remote
areas where
there was insufficient supervision, the postal ballot and moving people
into
key constituencies. We will have to look at all of these and decide
which we
will take to court once the dust has settled.
But there can be no doubt this was a huge upset. Zanu seems to have
been
dislodged by a variety of factors. They gerrymandered the electoral
districts giving the rural vote (their traditional source of power) a 2
to 1
advantage over the urban voter. Then they gerrymandered the voter's
roll and
the distribution of polling stations. These measures were overcome by
two
essential elements - a very high turn out of the voters in urban
areas (30
per cent of the voters roll but probably 65 per cent of the actual
number of
registered voters that are still here) and a very low turn out in rural
districts (15 per cent or less). They also underestimated the Makoni
factor
and he did much better than expected.
This was a referendum on Mugabe's leadership and even with all the
rigging
and gerrymandering, he is now just so unpopular that he could not be
rescued. I doubt if he got 10 per cent of the vote, nationwide. What
we
have witnessed in the last 24 hours are the last kicks of a dying
dynasty. I
wonder what is going on right now behind those closed doors!
Eddie Cross
31st March 2008
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