Mugabe clings on despite election defeat

Well, this is hardly a surprise is it?

Robert Mugabe was desperately trying to cling to power last night, despite his clear defeat in Zimbabwe's presidential election, by blocking the electoral commission from releasing official results and threatening to treat an opposition claim of victory as a coup.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said that what it regards as the overwhelming win by its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, is "under threat" despite growing support from foreign monitors for its claim of victory. The party also said it had "security concerns" after a police raid on its election offices yesterday. Tsvangirai made no public appearances, apparently out of concern for his safety.

Mugabe is now warning Tsvangirai not to claim that he is the president as that "is called a coup d'etat and we all know how coups are handled".

Independent monitors have said that Tsvangirai won 56% of the vote and that Mugabe - and I still find this figure astonishingly high - won 36%.

Mugabe's regime have yet to release any official results and seem not to know how to respond to such an overwhelming defeat, a defeat on such a scale that even Mugabe will have a hard time convincing anyone that he won.

The MDC's secretary general, Tendai Biti, said the party was increasingly alarmed at the refusal of the state-run Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to issue any results. "It appears the regime is at a loss how to respond ... We are really concerned by this assault on democracy. The primary point of an election is a result. We think there is a constitutional threat to those results," he said.

Normally in Zimbabwe the results of elections are posted within hours of the election taking place.

The ZEC's chairman, George Chiweshe, declined to explain why he was still not issuing results more than 24 hours after the polls closed. "This is a complicated election and we will release the results when we have them," he said.

There is no such thing as a "complicated" election as they all work on the exact same principle. People vote and someone counts the votes and announces the result. This election only appears to be "complicated" because it's not given the answer that Mugabe wanted.

They say that most Zimbabweans are not celebrating as there is a real fear that Mugabe will not accept the result and simply stand down after 28 years, and I have to say that this is a fear that I understand. I would be astonished if Mugabe simply strolled into the sunset, accepting that he had been defeated.

But from what the international monitors are saying it is strongly suspected that Mugabe has been defeated.

South African monitors said they believed the opposition had won but would hold off on a public statement until the official results were announced. The Pan-African parliament observer mission warned against further delays in issuing the results.

A British foreign office minister, Mark Malloch-Brown, said it was "quite likely" that Mugabe had lost despite "massive pre-election day cheating".

It'll be interesting to see what Mugabe does next.

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Tags: Zimbabwe, Mugabe, Tsvangirai, elections