ZanuPF and the MDC have both filed petitions with the Zimbabwean Electoral Court challenging the results of a total of 105 results from the recent elections.
MPs will still be sworn in and the government – such as it is – will continue whilst the Electoral Court rules on the results.
There is only one way that this is ever going to get resolved satisfactorily and that is by re-running the election with UN election monitors.
There is a suggestion that Morgan Tsvangirai might not stand in a presidential election re-run because MDC believe he won outright but I’m not sure what that would achieve. He may believe he won outright – he probably did – but why not just go through the motions and win the run-off? At least then Mugabe has no reason to cling on to power like he is now.
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In Kenya a similar (but crucially different) disputed election was successfully resolved through power-sharing. The old president clinging to power in Kenya had the backing of the World Bank, so there wasn’t a lot of media demonisation – despite similar violent reprisals…
Why won’t Tsvangirai’s MDC go through the motions? Well,
they’ve probably been instructed not to by the US/UK governments who don’t want power-sharing – they want Zanu-PF out of power completely because it is committed to a programme of land reform and the indigenisation (creating a native upper class at the expense of foreign owners of capital).
Or maybe they want to leave to rot as a startiling memorial to how well left wing economic/communist policies work in the real world?
I think, however, the major point we are all missing out on is distance, Zimbabwe is miles from the sea and good transport.
I think we forget how big Africa is, when we see a map of it in TV and then in the next minute, we see a map of Britain, it stilts our perspective.
Yeah but the French could get us in through Mozambique I’m sure.
No, you are missing out the whole scale of the place, going via mozambique is worse than you going to Germany via Bordeuax!
Zimbabwe is almost twice the size of Britain