BBC reports that High Court Judge Tendai Uchena has ruled he does have jurisdiction to hear the MDC’s case, so it’s been scheduled for tomorrow. Wonder if they’ll be allowed to get to the court this time.  One noticeable comment is this one:

Although the judge said he did have jurisdiction in the matter, he said he would decide on Tuesday whether to treat it as an urgent case, before hearing the actual arguments.

So there may still be some to’ing and fro’ing before there’s any real judgement handed down.  I would have thought the urgency of the situation was obvious, but there you go.

The following advert appeared in this weekend’s Zimbabwe Standard – as you’ll see, the quote attributed to Mugabe isn’t from that long ago (he said it as he left the polling station on March 29th, as it happens), but as yet he doesn’t appear to have realised that it now applies to him…

Monday morning, and all is pretty much as it was on Friday – there’s been a lot of activity across the weekend, but nothing that got us any closer to getting the results of the Presidential poll.  Let’s start with a handy little visual of the Parliamentary results:

MDC have asked for a recount on one House of Assembly seat, while Zanu-PF are challenging the results of 16 others – enough to give them back their overall majority, if the challenges are successful.  There’s a certain wry amusement that comes from seeing Zanu-PF challenge electoral results on the basis of ‘irregularities’, as they’re usually the cause of them, rather than the victims, but that’s the new world they’re in.  Unfortunately they still have enough clout to influence those challenges – a number of ZEC officials in the constituencies concerned have already been arrested – so you can’t rule out that they’ll get their way.  In the Senate, the combined MDC total would have been higher if they hadn’t split their vote – there are a number of constituencies where the combined MDC vote is higher than the winning Zanu-PF vote – which will hopefully teach both factions a lesson about the value of co-operation.

The Presidential result is what everyone wants to see, though, and both MDC and Zanu-PF have been fighting on that front – MDC to get it released, and Zanu-PF to get it further delayed.  After being prevented from reaching court of Saturday, MDC’s petition to force ZEC to release the results was heard on Sunday.  ZEC opposed on the basis that the High Court does not have jurisdiction to make any such order – judgement has been reserved and is due sometime today.  Meanwhile, Zanu-PF have written to ZEC asking them to delay the result for a “recount and audit”, citing the same irregularities mentioned above.  It appears there may be no legal grounds for such a request – This is Zimbabwe has the legal arguments for that, but in short there’s no provision in the Electoral Act for recounts to be requested in the Presidential vote.  Even if the same procedures laid out for the HoA and Senate votes apply, then a winner must be declared duly elected before a recount can be requested – and, as you know, 9 days down the line we still have no winner.

On the ground, the tension is rising and comments from Zanu-PF and their supporters are getting more inflammatory and worrying – the news articles collected by Zimbabwe Situation give a good flavour, so here’s a sample.  Attention now turns to the High Court, although whatever they rule I’d expect an immediate appeal by the losing party…

Hi there…  After the Zimbabwean elections on the 29th March, I made a short post to a LiveJournal page on my thoughts on how to results were looking at that time.  That was 8 days ago, and as you probably know, since then the whole thing has taken on a farcical quality, and I’ve found myself blogging the mess as it unravelled.  But my LJ was never really meant for such things, so I’ve moved them here.

Why “Occasional”?  At the moment, I’ve no idea if I’ll carry on blogging things Zimbabwean once the results issue is finally resolved – I have a few ideas of what I’d like to do, but time is always an issue.  If nothing else, there’ll be an archive of an unimportant Zim exile’s thoughts on the mess.

I’m still tweaking the site template, so please don’t mind if things appear and disappear until I get it right…

…and still the story goes on. I took a break from following events for most of today, as a few incidents yesterday got my blood boiling to the point where thinking about it all coherently wasn’t really possible. When that happens, it’s time to take a step back.

Senate results are complete – of the 60 elected seats, Zanu-PF have 30, MDC/Tsvangirai 24, and MDC/Mutambara 6 – so whoever wins the Presidential poll, if it’s ever announced, will control the Senate. By law, ZEC now have to move on to the Presidential results – but then, by law, they should have been announced by yesterday at the latest, and we’re still waiting.

MDC/T’s attempt to get a court order forcing release of the results was blocked by armed police, who prevented their lawyers from entering the court. Well, men in police uniforms, although most people reckon is was the CIO (Central Intelligence Organisation, Zimbabwe’s secret police, who are under Mugabe’s direct control). MDC will try again tomorrow, but it seems that someone really doesn’t want those results released.

That makes me think that the MDC’s predicted result of a Tsvangirai win is the correct one – if a run-off is required and Bob’s happy to have it, then I can’t think of any reason to hold the result back further. Thinking on down that line and bearing in mind reports yesterday of provocation, and threats by war vet to ‘protect the country’s sovereignty’ (a veiled threat to begin civil war), and the Burma scenario begins to look likely: create a violent situation, declare a State of Emergency, and annul the elections.

There still seems to be hope on the ground that it won’t come to that, though, and MDC supporters still don’t appear to have risen to the bait. And so the waiting continues, as we move into day eight.

I speculated earlier that last night’s raids may have been an attempt to provoke street protests by MDC supporters, but that it didn’t seem to have worked. Now it seems the tactics may be getting sneaker – albeit more typically Zanu-PF’s style:

Reports coming through from Zimbabwe indicate that the stalling of an announcement on the results of the Presidential elections could be a mechanism for buying time and provoking violence in order to mobilise the armed forces and militia against the people.

Yesterday afternoon, Zanu PF youths dressed in the regalia of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party visited the MDC’s headquarters at Harvest House in Harare, saying that “we must demonstrate on the streets”.

Fortunately, the MDC received prior warning and the situation was defused.

This was followed by an intelligence report earlier this morning that Zanu PF had called in youths to their headquarters in Harare. They were told that the MDC had brought back all of the white people from the region to take back the farms. They were also fed the traditional Zanu PF rhetoric that Zimbabweans – through their voting – have demonstrated they no longer believe.

According to our sources, they were then planning to march to Harvest House and provoke a situation. Riot police have been put on stand by to “deal with any situations”.

A report just received from the Masvingo in the south of the country warns that armed men are being deployed in the rural areas.

Zimbabwe is on a knife edge. The MDC says it is absolutely essential for South Africa and neighbouring countries to act now as the situation is extremely volatile.

The Zimbabwean government has acted with ruthlessness in the past and all indications are that it will do so again.

We will keep you informed of developments.

Zanu-PF Politburo meeting reportedly just ended. The BBC reports that the party has given their support for Mugabe to participate in a run-off vote. The above shenanigans, and other reports on the ground that roadblocks are going up in Harare and Bulawayo, seem to suggest Bob’s decided not to go without a fight. And knowing him, that fight could get very bloody.

Looking at the total votes cast for the House of Assembly, you may be asking how the initial predictions of an MDC landslide turned into a neck-and-neck contest, with Zanu-PF actually showing a majority of the total votes cast (or you could be wishing I’d get back to my usual one post a month, and stop clogging up your Friends list – in which case don’t worry, it’ll be over soon). There are a couple of possible reasons for this, so let’s take a look at them.

1) Re-allocation of Votes
Zimbabwe Today details the mechanics of this in this article – the main effect of this tactic is to keep the allocation of parliamentary seats the same, giving the opposition little cause for complaint, while inflating the Zanu-PF vote to make it less of a surprise when Tsvangirai fails to reach the 50% target in the Presidential vote. If you look at the figures for what would have been my constituency if I was still in Zim, Mount Pleasant, you can see how that would look, if it was being done:

The PVT figures are the “scores on the doors”, the ZEC figures are the official numbers from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. Compare the two, and you’ll see that the numbers for MDC/Tsvangirai are deflated, with a corresponding increase across the other candidates. That could be vote re-allocation, or it could be clerical error by either ZEC or the people collecting the PVT figures – at this stage, there’s no way to tell, but you can bet the opposition will be looking for evidence of the former.

2) Unusually-High Turnout
Rural areas are notoriously hard to police – election observers tend to stay in the urban areas and constituencies around them and never get out to the sticks. Same applies to party agents – they can’t get to every constituency, every polling station, so it makes it easier to indulge in some good old-fanshioned ballot stuffing. An indicator for this would be an unusually-high turnout, and/or a very large winning margin for one party. With there being a pattern of this happening in Zanu-PF wins, especially in the rural Mashonaland districts, there’s concern in some corners that this has been happening.

Regarding the generally “low” turnout in the election – usually around the mid-30% range – bear in mind that, by some estimates, as many as half the names on the voter’s roll are people who are either dead or who have left the country.

3) General Skullduggery
Sokwanele has an interactive map showing reported cases of what they call “actions against the SADC norms”. SADC is the Southern African Development Community, who have a document, the Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections, that member states including Zim should follow – the map records cases that break those guidelines. It’s a lot more sparseley populated than in previous elections, but there are still some pretty nasty incidents listed.

Also in this category would be cases of ballot boxes not being properly protected after polling, or simply going missing, which have been reported in some constituencies.

So even though the official results match the PVT results as far as House of Assembly seats are concerned, there’s still been some scope for manipulation, although no-one’s making much of it at the moment. That may change after the Presidential results are finally announced, though.

As for the current state of play… No further results announced since the 10 Senate seats that came out last night. MDC/Tsvangirai have begun court action in Harare to force the release of the Presidential results, but as the electoral laws only require results to be announced within 6 days of polling closing (that would be 9pm Zim time tonight), they’re unlikely to get anywhere until that deadline passes. Electoral law also states the order in which the results should be announced, incidentally, and Senate must be announced before Presidential – which explains why ZEC are able to waste time on a set of results that no-one’s really interested in.

There don’t appear to have been any more raids since the two reported last night – they were possibly an attempt to provoke protests by MDC supporters & gain an excuse for a security crackdown, but if so no-one’s rising to the bait. The ever-eloquent Hope at This is Zimbabwe talks of the fears that began rising when that news broke (their permalinks seem to be borked at the moment – if that link doesn’t work, try this, and page down to the article “…and then there are the lows”). Moses Moyo at Zimbabwe Today has been hearing from his sources about a flurry of activity amongst Zanu-PF officials, and expects that things will finally be resolved today:

This overall need to remove evidence of past misdeeds is one reason why the government has delayed the announcement of the election results for so long. Today all that should finally come to an end.

Zimbabwe Situation have been doing their usual trawling of news sources, and have captured a number of pieces that are worth reading. If reports are accurate – far from guaranteed, it seems – then Mugabe and Zanu-PF should be meeting about now to decide how to proceed. Expect events to move quickly once that meeting is over.

First Senate results are out, and following the trend it’s MDC/Tsvangirai 5, Zanu-PF 5. Two of those Zanu-PF seats would have gone to the MDC, if having both factions fielding candidates there hadn’t split their vote.

But that’s not the main news tonight. It seems Mugabe may have decided to come out fighting, despite diplomatic efforts from some of his close allies (including former Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano) to get him to step down. A Zanu-PF spokesman earlier stated that Zanu-PF had only put 25% effort into these elections, but that they would now “unleash” 100% effort to make sure they won any run-off Presidential vote. That word “unleash” has worrying connotations, given what was unleashed on the country in the previous two general elections.

Now, there are reports that two foreign journalists in Harare have been arrested, that police have raided MDC offices in Harare, and that some members of the MDC leadership, including Tsvangirai, have opted to keep a low profile for a while. The police raid is officially to do with the MDC’s victory declaration – as mentioned previously, it’s illegal under Zim’s election law to declare victory before ZEC have declared the official results – but in reality it’s a thinly-veiled attempt at intimidation, and possibly a sign that things may turn nasty.

I suspect some in Zim will be having a restless night tonight.

Gotta have a sense of humour at times like these… :)

 

I mentioned in my last post about the issues around the two MDC factions working together. By way of an example, here is MDC/Tsvangirai’s Eddie Cross taking some delight at how poorly the Mutambara faction fared in the polls, while here MDC/Mutambara’s David Coltart blames the Tsvangirai faction for creating a situation where some seats were lost to Zanu-PF because of a split vote between the two factions’ candidates (sorry, who’s the breakaway faction again..?).

I side with Hope over at This is Zimbabwe, who delivers a plea for both sides to work out their differences:

When the time comes to talk, SORT IT OUT (yes, I am shouting) and work together. If the two sides can’t fix their internal issues, then it will be very hard for me as an ordinary person to ever imagine how the opposition can fix hyper-inflation, poverty, our massive health-crisis, unemployment, starvation, homelessness, etc, etc.

The truth is that, given the enormity of the challenges we have ahead of us, it really is genuinely inconceivable to me that there would be any likelihood that they couldn’t work together (you can put my rant here down to long supressed frustration).

They need each other, and we need them; they must know that. While I am still riding the wave of happiness that we just delivered Zanu-PF a non-violent slap back in their face, I have faith in the opposition’s ability to find a way through their differences.

Hear, hear. No Senate results yet, but State media is reporting they’ll be out before the end of the day. Allegedly.