Harare -
Lawyers for Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Morgan Tsvangirai have begun preparing a legal challenge to have his defeat by President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF in last week’s general elections annulled.
Mugabe beat Tsvangirai by 61 percent to 33 percent in the presidential election and Zanu-PF crushed Tsvangirai’s main MDC party in the parliamentary election by winning more than two thirds of the 210 seats - enough to change aspects of the new constitution recently adopted, according to results released by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC).
President Jacob Zuma yesterday offered his “profound congratulations” to Mugabe on his victory and urged all parties to accept the outcome “as election observers reported it to be an expression of the will of the people”.
But in fact, neither of the two main election observer missions, from the AU and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), said they were able to pronounce the elections as fair yet.
The DA slammed Zuma for his statement, saying he had failed the Zimbabwean people, and Western countries also strongly criticised the conduct of the elections.
Tsvangirai rejected the elections as a “huge farce” and a “sham”, alleging widespread vote-rigging, mainly through manipulation of the voters roll which was given to the MDC and other opposition parties just before voting began, too late for them to check for flaws.
The MDC has alleged huge anomalies in the roll, dead voters, people moved from their constituencies without being informed, and voters with identical names, addresses and dates of birth but different ID numbers.
The MDC has seven days to get to court with its evidence which will be heard by the new Constitutional Court, which has, since it was formed two months ago, backed Zanu-PF’s side in each matter brought before it so far.
“We are working on the case and are going through evidence and there is quite a lot of it,” said one of the lawyers for the MDC.
But other lawyers believe that the SADC and the AU have approved the elections bar a few quibbles, and that this will make it hard for the MDC to win the case.
The evidence will include testimony from would-be voters who claim they were turned away because they had turned up at the wrong ward or constituency.
The ZEC said those whose names were not on the voters roll could still vote if they had a voters registration slip receipt and their ID.
Tsvangirai received about the name number of votes - 1.1 million - in this election as in 2008 when he beat Mugabe in the first round by 48 to 43 percent. In this election, Mugabe scored over 1.1 million more votes, with a voters’ roll of 6.4 million people in a population counted last year of 13.9 million.
The Star