I’m genuinely on edge and excited typing this.

The last results issued by the ZEC where at around 1pm Zimbabwe time today - it’s now 8:30pm, and the silence is deafening. As of that announcement, the parties were still essentially level-pegging (MDC/Tsvangarai 67, MDC/Mutambara 5, Zanu-PF 68). Now, the most optimistic of the unofficial results put Zanu-PF as winning in the region of 70-odd seats (out of 210) in the House of Assembly, so if the ZEC were trying to portray this as a close result without resorting to wholesale fiddling of the returns, they would have been rapidly running out of Zanu-PF results to announce. And sure enough, the announcements stopped.

In the meantime, unofficial counts of the Presidential vote indicate that while the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangarai has won it, he’s narrowly short of the 50% required to avoid a run-off. Mugabe has apparently polled in the region of 40%.

Move forward 7 hours, and there’s a firestorm of rumour, that the MDC and Zanu-PF have been in negotiations, brokered by South Africa, to arrange for Mugabe’s orderly departure. All three parties are officially denying any such talks, but the rumours are coming from so many different sources that it’s beginning to look as though the deal is in the works. Current talk is of Mugabe giving a televised address to the nation within the next hour or so, announcing his decision to not stand in the 2nd round of the Presidential vote - presumably as he knows he can’t win it without resorting to either rigging or violence, or both, on a massive scale. A decision not to stand would hand the Presidency to Tsvangarai - and presumably, the honest results of the rest of the HoA and Senate seats could then be announced.

So goes the speculation, anyway - but with denials flying around as fast as the rumours themselves, no-one knows for sure, except officials of the two parties. The waiting continues - but now with a genuine sense of excitement in the air.