ZIMBABWE - VOTE

One month on, Zimbabwe still in the dark

Tuesday 29 April 2008

Verification of Zimbabwe's disputed presidential election results is due to start, a month after the vote, now that a partial recount has ended. Zimbabwe's main opposition leader called on President Robert Mugabe to step down.

Tuesday 29 April 2008

By AFP

A month after Zimbabweans took to the polls to pick a president, the outcome of the vote is still not in sight as the United Nations prepared on Tuesday to discuss the Zimbabwe impasse.

Suggestions by the country's electoral body that results of the March 29 presidential vote could be out later this week after the completion of a partial recount of ballots have been met with scepticism in some quarters.

Representatives of the main presidential candidates -- President Robert Mugabe and his opposition challenger Morgan Tsvangirai -- still have to meet electoral officials before the results are released.

Critics say a record has been set for the longest period a nation has had to wait for election results, leaving in limbo a country that is already reeling from a deep economic crisis.

"We are entering the African Guinness book of records for a protracted period before the announcement of presidential election results," said Takavafira Zhou, a political science lecturer at Midlands State University.

"It's definitely a world record and it's not something to be proud of. And, when it comes, its credibility will be irretrievably compromised," said Jonathan Moyo, a former Mugabe protege.

Nelson Chamisa, spokesman for the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, said: "We have broken a record and this kind of arrogance is certainly encyclopaedic."

But Bright Matonga, a spokesman for Mugabe's ZANU-PF party and deputy information minister, thinks otherwise and cites delays in the US presidential vote in 2003 and in Belgium, which went for months without a prime minister.

"Its not a question of breaking records, but a it's a question of doing things in a proper and transparent manner rather than rushing and doing things the wrong way and shed lots of blood," Matonga said.

"Our law does not have a specific time limit by which results would be released" and says that if the electoral commission cannot organise a second round of voting immediately it has 12 months in which to do so, he told AFP.

After March 29 parliamentary and presidential elections, only legislative results were published and then disputed by ZANU-PF, forcing a recount in 23 of the country's 210 contituencies.

The final outcome in the parliamentary vote showed Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) had lost its control of parliament for the first time in nearly three decades.

The trouble, Moyo said, is that the country's laws never provided for such long delays on announcing the results.

"No one in their right mind ever thought people would fail to count votes within a reasonable time, the reasonable time being 36 hours. What has happened is unprecedented," he said.

Chamisa accused Mugabe of deliberately drawing out the wait, saying: "At this rate it is not surprising that Mugabe would want to shock the nation and get to Christmas as president by default".

"What makes our situation unique and dangerous is that there is no reason for the delay," he said.