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The time for recounts has indeed run out
The Sunday Independent (SA)
April 06, 2008

http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=18537

Any recount of contested votes in Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections would be against the law.

Harare - If Zanu PF and the Zimbabwe Election Commission (ZEC) obey the law there will be no recount of any parliamentary seats. The deadline for any recount expired 48 hours after results were posted outside polling stations around the country in terms of electoral law negotiated last year between Zanu PF and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and mediated on behalf of Southern African Development Community by President Thabo Mbeki. Didymus Mutasa, the Zanu PF secretary, said late Friday that he was demanding a recount of 16 constituencies. He described the elections last Saturday as "chaotic" after emerging from a politburo meeting. The parliamentary results stripped Zanu PF of its control of parliament for the first time since independence in 1980.

According to Tendai Biti and Welshman Ncube, the two MDC leaders who negotiated the electoral laws, a recount is impossible. "He is out of time. If he wanted a recount he had to do so timeously," Biti, the MDC secretary-general, said. He said a Zanu PF candidate in eastern Zimbabwe who lost to the MDC by 30 votes had already tried to get the ballot recounted. "The commission in Mutare informed him he was too late," Biti said. Most results of the parliamentary polls were posted at polling stations last Sunday and the final count was officially released by ZEC on Wednesday. It showed that Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC had won a majority of two in the 210 seat parliament, but that with its ally, the Arthur Mutumbara MDC and one independent seat, it has nine more parliamentary seats than Zanu PF, with three by-elections in strong MDC areas ahead.

If there was a run-off, Ncube, the secretary-general for the Mutambara MDC, said in Bulawayo yesterday that Tsvangirai would dramatically increase his lead over Mugabe. The MDC estimates that Tsvangirai got 50,3 percent of the vote in last Saturday's presidential poll, but independent analysts say it is more likely that he got about 49 percent to Mugabe's 42 percent and about 7 percent to Simba Makoni, a former Zanu PF stalwart who ran as an independent. The winner has to have 50 percent plus one vote or a run-off election between the top two candidates must be held within 21 days. Mugabe's Zanu PF politburo said on Friday it had agreed that if he did not win the poll in the first round he would take part in the run-off. There was growing speculation on Friday night that Mugabe would use his executive powers to issue a decree to delay the run-off for 90 days from when the seriously delayed presidential results were announced.

Even if that does happen, and Mugabe issues a decree to that effect, he would have almost no chance of winning the popular vote and would find his support severely cut in a run-off, Ncube said. "At least 7 percent of the vote which went to Simba Makoni will go to Tsvangirai in a run-off," Ncube said. "There are also many thousands of votes in the Mashonaland provinces where we had a candidate standing against independents and Tsvangirai will get that vote too. "The anti-Mugabe vote will just be too huge for him to win any run-off." This analysis assumes a fair contest, however. Many expect that Mugabe will instead resort to the same methods he has used to win elections for the past eight years: violence, food hand-outs and general thuggery. But Biti believes the country has moved beyond that. Yet the fear of Mugabe's thugs has already begun in some areas.

"We have had calls from workers and customers who voted for the MDC who are now really worried when they watch the [Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation television] news," said a Harare businessman who runs a busy shop in a small complex west of the city. "They are ringing to ask us if the war veterans [who marched though Harare on Friday] will come and get them or find out how they voted." Yet the police are no longer uniformly behind Mugabe. And it will be they who will be on duty in any run-off. A group of about 40 of them outside a police station in a small town west of Harare, normally a Zanu PF stronghold, said on Friday that they had had enough. One said they would not show up for duty for another national election. "They will have to force us," one said. They did not believe they would be paid enough even for last Saturday's poll to make it worthwhile.

Many economists, businessmen and analysts believe there is no way that even Zimbabwe's extraordinarily stout German printing machines at Fidelity Printers, the mint, will be able to churn out enough notes to fund the local costs of another election. There is zero foreign cash available - even after Gideon Gono, the Reserve Bank governor, cleared out corporate foreign currency accounts to meet the cost of last Saturday's poll. Zimbabwe has largely shut down, waiting for the outcome of the election contest to be resolved. Many industries were silent this week - they turned off machines on the eve of the poll - and will remain closed until after there is a political resolution. ''We do have some raw materials on hand, but we will not use them until we know what is going to happen politically," said a Harare industrialist. "So until there is a new government which will take note of what we are saying, there is no point in producing any goods. Don't quote me. I will agree to be quoted in future if we get a new government," he said. This week, in a grave admission of failure, the central bank announced that it had distributed new Z$50 million notes - worth about $1 (or about R8) to commercial banks. An inflation rate of about 165 000 percent made the new notes essential to keep the ever-shrinking economy just ticking over.

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