(Last Updated on August 3, 2013 by Editor)
ZIMBAWE – President Robert Mugabeappeared set to win a mandate to rule Zimbabwe until he’s 94 as his party secured a majority in parliament in elections that African nations endorsed and his main rival called a “farce.”
Results from the electoral commission late yesterday gave Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front 137 of the 210 elected seats in parliament, three shy of a two-thirds
majority, compared with 48 for Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, and one for an independent. The tally for the presidential race wasn’t released. Tsvangirai said widespread rigging meant the July 31 elections were “null and void.”
Both the African Union and the Southern African Development Community, which sent the biggest international observer teams, endorsed the elections as largely free and fair. The main local monitoring team, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network, said balloting was “seriously compromised.”
“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.
Tsvangirai, 61, made a series of complaints against the election, in which he was bidding to end the 33-year rule of Mugabe, 89. He said 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.
African Endorsement
He received little backing for his complaints from African countries.
The head of the African Union 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.
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.”
The local monitoring group, which had almost 10 times as many observers as the African Union and SADC, said as many as 1 million voters in the MDC’s urban strongholds were left off the
voters roll.
Registration Process
“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.”
The MDC’s National Executive Council started a two-day meeting yesterday to review the elections, party spokesman Douglas Mwonzora said.
The MDC “has to look at its shortcomings,” Gwinyayi Dzinesa, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies, said yesterday in 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 that marred the last Mugabe-Tsvangirai contest in 2008.
Policy Approval
That year, Tsvangirai led the first round of the electionbefore 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.
Saviour Kasukuwere, a member of Zanu-PF’s politburo and minister for indigenization, as Mugabe’s program to increase the holdings of black Zimbabweans in the economy is known, called the election “a resounding stamp of approval for our policies” during a telephone interview Aug. 1.
Mugabe and Zanu-PF have forced mining companies such as Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd. (IMP) and Anglo American Platinum Ltd. (AMS) 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.
“We are very happy, smiling, victory is on our side,” Zanu-PF spokesman Rugare Gumbo told reporters yesterday in Harare.
To contact the reporters on this story: Franz Wild in Harare at fwild@bloomberg.net; Godfrey Marawanyika in Harare at gmarawanyika@bloomberg.net; Brian Latham in Harare at blatham@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nasreen Seria at nseria@bloomberg.net
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe
Jekesai Njikizana/AFP/Getty Images
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, speaks at a press briefing at the State House on July 30, 2013, a day ahead of the general election in Zimbabwe.
Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, speaks at a press briefing at the State House on July 30, 2013, a day ahead of the general election in Zimbabwe. Photographer: Jekesai Njikizana/AFP/Getty Images