The contents of this news report likely won’t surprise anyone – everyone’s been suspecting for a few days now that Zanu-PF would revert to form, and so it’s begun. All this despite some apparent pressure from a usually effective persauder to get Bob to stand aside gracefully (scroll down past the court stuff) – I think someone there has realised the risks of pushing this too far.  Incidentally, Judge Uchena has agreed to hear the MDC’s petition as a “matter of urgency” – so given the current urgent pace of events, it’ll be heard sometime after the outstanding challenges to the 2002 poll results.  I’ll put my cynicism away now.

There’s been some criticism of Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to visit South Africa when some would rather he stayed at home and showed some “real leadership”, the view being that by letting the situation drag on without any real protest, the MDC are at risk of allowing their win to be stolen again.  Personally, I’m not sure that calling for people to hit the streets – as some now want to see – would be a good idea (see previous comments about giving Mugabe an excuse to crack down), but either way Zimbabwe Today has a look at why the visit could work in the MDC’s favour.  The key seems to be Jacob Zuma, who holds far more forthright views on the ZImbabwean situation than Thabo Mbeki seems to (see Briggs Bomba’s piece at Kubatana – paragraph 7 onwards – for some thoughts on the “quiet diplomacy” approach), but whose involvement may not be without risk.

Finally for this piece, it’s over to the man who would (or should) be President, who puts his thoughts on paper over at Zimbabwe Metro.