Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai dismissed Zimbabwe’s election as a farce yesterday after his rival President Robert Mugabe’s party claimed a landslide victory that would secure another five years in power for Africa’s oldest head of state.
Speaking at the headquarters of his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a downbeat Tsvangirai said Wednesday’s vote should be rejected as invalid because of polling day irregularities and vote-rigging by 89-year-old Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party.
“This has been a huge farce,” he told reporters. “In our view, that election is null and void.” He did not take questions, leaving it unclear whether he or his party will mount any kind of legal challenge.
The conflicting claims from the two main competing camps came before Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission had issued any official results, and raised the prospect of an acrimonious post-election dispute.
There are fears that this could spill over into violence, as happened after the last election in 2008 when 200 MDC supporters were killed in the wake of a first-round defeat for Mugabe, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980.
Wednesday’s poll was peaceful but the largest independent observer group said it was seriously compromised because of voter registration problems that may have disenfranchised up to a million people – a fifth of all Zimbabweans of voting age.
Releasing unofficial results early is illegal, and police had said they would arrest anybody who did this.
However, a senior source in Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, who asked not to be named, said that less than 15 hours after the polls closed the result had already been made clear.
“We’ve taken this election. We’ve buried the MDC. We never had any doubt that we were going to win,” the source said, but gave no vote numbers.
If confirmed, Mugabe’s victory is likely to mean five more years of troubled relations with the West, where the former liberation fighter is regarded as a ruthless despot responsible for serious human rights abuses and wrecking the economy.
Asked on the eve of the polls if he was fit enough to last in office until the age of 94, Mugabe joked about the reports of his imminent death that occasionally surface in the media.
“According to Europe and perhaps America, I died. I don’t know how many times I died,” he said. “But never would they say I have resurrected. I’m not dead yet.”
Western election observers were barred from entering the southern African country, which has rich reserves of minerals such as diamonds and coal.