Mugabe era's end may be near

Zimbabwe's long-time ruler may be running out of options after Saturday's vote.

from the April 3, 2008 edition

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"The delay in announcing the [official] outcome must be seen as a deliberate and calculated tactic," said Foreign Secretary David Miliband from London. Mr. Miliband said that Zimbabwe had not taken proper precautions to ensure free and fair elections on Saturday and urged that any runoff be held "in a way that gives far greater respect ... to electoral standards."

"I think [Tsvangirai] would be crazy to go for a runoff," says Marian Tupy, an expert on southern Africa and economic reform at the Cato Institute in Washington. "To go into a second round would mean defeat. The ZEC is not independent – they would come up with the numbers to ensure that Mugabe wins."

"This is Mugabe we're dealing with here," Mr. Tupy adds. "He's stolen two elections and he's trying to steal a third."

In the event of a runoff, Mugabe would deploy his war veterans and youth militia to use violence to intimidate the opposition, says Eldred Masunungare, a University of Zimbabwe political scientist. But Mugabe would be unlikely to rely on the Army, police, and intelligence services because "the police and the soldiers are equally disgruntled and the foot soldiers might refuse to obey orders to beat up people or stage a coup."

Hard to steal this election

If Mugabe stole elections in the past, he did it with a very different ZANU-PF than the one he has today. In 2002, ZANU-PF was unified against Tsvangirai, and even though the popular vote seemed to go against Mugabe, the president still won soundly.

Today, with an inflation rate of 100,000 percent, 80 percent unemployment, and life expectancy rates for men dipping downto age 37, even ZANU-PF members are finding it difficult to survive.

Consider the electoral workers who ended up running the polls on election day. In past years, teachers from state schools – each of whom relied on ZANU-PF for their state jobs – were dragooned into being poll workers. This year, one Zimbabwe watcher says, "they brought in police and other civil servants to run the polls, and even then, they didn't know if they could trust them."

And because of new electoral laws, insisted on by the Southern African Development Community, ZEC poll workers had to count votes in polling stations and announce results on election night, two measures that made it harder for the government to cook up voter numbers in their favor. That, too, will remain true in the case of a runoff.

• A journalist who could not be named for security reasons contributed from Harare.

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