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An exercise in patience
Sophie Shaw, The Guardian (UK)
April 21, 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/21/zimbabwe1?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Four policemen at a roadblock carrying assault rifles direct me. It's six miles (10km) down a dirt road to the district administrator's office where the recount is taking place. The road is bad - nobody in a government Mercedes has been to this remote corner of Manicaland since the last election. The office must have looked grand once, but it is now grim. There are broken panes, piles of rat droppings and a strange photo of President Robert Mugabe from two decades ago; a young-looking 65-year-old with a grimace for a smile. The compound is packed with bored police, tense party activists and anxious presiding officers, who may be joining colleagues in prison accused of corruptly inflating the opposition vote three weeks ago. They are in for a hot wait in the sun, perhaps for several days, sleeping where they can, before they are summoned.

A platoon of police and electoral commission officials is extracting sorry-looking ballot boxes from a storeroom. At the end of a long night of counting on March 29, presiding officers at 10,000 polling stations around the country recorded their results, inventoried their boxes and sealed them with padlocks and wax. Now one has a hole bashed in the side; others are not securely fastened.

In a "boardroom" furnished with wobbly tables and broken chairs, Priscilla is in charge of the recount. She carries her authority well. She is from Harare and works for "a government agency, not the electoral commission, but I'm acting for the electoral commission". She welcomes foreign observers and I sit next to a large Angolan from the Southern African Development Community team. He soon falls asleep as the rising sun, the throng and activity push the temperature above 30C. But before Priscilla can start, Lovemore, the new Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) MP for this area, elected by a whiskery majority of 20, objects to the recount. It is illegal and he demands that it be stopped. He and Priscilla, who is determined to press on, argue for an hour. Their exchange is tenacious and passionate, but logical and respectful. They reach a typically Zimbabwean compromise. Priscilla will proceed, but Lovemore will explain to the room what is wrong.

He clears his throat theatrically: "Respectfully madam, I want the electoral commission to tell us here present who called for this recount - was it themselves or the Zanu-PF? And I want to see the written application for a recount. Was it submitted less than 48 hours after the original vote? If not, this recount is illegal. I also want to know if the original results recorded will be produced? And where have these ballot boxes been kept? And who has had access to them? And if there are any differences between the original results and what we see today, I want you madam to hold an inquiry to find out why. Until these questions are answered the MDC takes part in this recount under protest."

While Priscilla happily ignores these awkward questions and bustles around to get things moving, Lovemore comes over to tell me more. He won his seat despite intimidation of voters and attempts by the ruling Zanu-PF to monitor individual votes. Now Zanu-PF is trying to overturn his victory. It needs to snatch back a dozen marginal constituencies to regain a parliamentary majority. Lovemore has heard that on April 9, 11 days after the election, a group of Zanu-PF officials, helped by the electoral commission and the police, broke into the ballot boxes, took out MDC votes and replaced them with forged papers marked for Zanu-PF. Witnesses are ready to testify to this in court, but their safety needs to be guaranteed.

Meanwhile, Priscilla has the first ballot box open. There are problems - first a security tag has the wrong serial number, then the number of votes does not match the number of names ticked off the electoral roll. Priscilla looks wrathfully at the presiding officer, but he manages to talk his way out of trouble.

The counting is paint-dryingly slow. The presiding officer holds each vote up for scrutiny by party agents. There are protracted arguments about individual papers - does a cross made with red ink mean that a ballot is spoiled? And once the presidential votes have been counted, the process is repeated for the senate, parliamentary and local council elections. Then the presiding officer, who looks like he wants to vomit up his fear, painstakingly goes through the electoral roll, checking that the number of names ticked off equals the number of votes cast. It's 1pm before the first box is finished. We've been at it for five hours.

The results are announced. Lovemore is pleased that the votes match what he noted down on election night. This first box, at least, has not been tampered with. There's a change of mood in the room as the presidential result is announced: Tsvangirai 164, Mugabe 106, Makoni 5. These figures have been suppressed for three weeks and for many in the room it's the first partial confirmation of rumours that the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai has won and may even have scored the magic 50% that would give him the presidency immediately.

Lovemore is in reflective mood as the day drags on. He is frustrated that Tsvangirai is out of the country, but what else can the leader do? He might be killed or arrested if he returns. Ordinary activists are being beaten and burned out of their homes by Zanu-PF youth. Lovemore fears that Mugabe plans to grind those who supported the opposition into submission and then call for a run-off presidential vote. That would give the MDC a desperate dilemma - whether to try to win a dirty fight or to boycott and hand Mugabe a default victory. Even with such a feeble mandate, Mugabe might try to soldier on for a few more years, at least while he has the strong backing of his South African counterpart, Thabo Mbeki.

The Zanu-PF candidate, Charity, is a bright young woman who explains to me that Zanu-PF is modernising and reaching out to the disenfranchised 52% of the population. She has a point - the MDC is a notoriously chauvinistic party. Lovemore shrugs his shoulders when I ask him why: "The country has to eat before we can worry about advancing our women". I don't get the feeling Lovemore spends much time worrying about Zimbabwe's non-advanced women, but it is true that women suffer the brunt of hunger and poverty resulting from the economic collapse.

At a snail's pace, I watch five out of 39 boxes being recounted during the day. It's going to take at least three days to finish the recount, maybe more. But despite the flaws in this weary process, there's no sign yet that anybody has stuffed any of the boxes. So why on earth are so many hundreds of people spending so long on this pointless exercise? Maybe the rigging will be done tomorrow or next week, when the observers are so weary that they've stopped noticing what's happening. Maybe this huge exercise is simply intended to buy time for a dying regime. Zimbabweans love to "make a plan" to address their difficulties. Maybe Mugabe's plan is to soften the country up for a bloody run-off. Maybe his friends need time to get money out of the country. Or maybe there is no plan and he's just clinging on because he knows nothing other than power. After all, he was voted out of office three weeks ago, so every day he hangs on to the presidency is a victory.

*Sophie Shaw is a pseudonym

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