Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Nonthando Bhebhe in Harare
24 April 2008

Ruling party insiders say President Mugabe is effectively hostage to his security chiefs’ demands for continuity.

Officials of the ruling ZANU-PF party say President Robert Mugabe is no longer fully in control, with much of the government’s day-to-day affairs being run by military and security chiefs.

Senior ZANU-PF insiders have told IWPR that Mugabe is now out of touch with what is happening on the ground.

Instead, they said, key decisions were being made by the Joint Operations Command, JOC, which consists of the heads of the army, air force, prison services and intelligence. The JOC, which is chaired by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Constantine Chiwenga, coordinates military and security affairs and many observers believe it carries more real clout than the cabinet.

Their ties with Mugabe date back to the liberation struggle of the Seventies.

The party officials, who did not want to be identified, said decision-making was taken over by military and security chiefs after it became clear that Mugabe had lost the March 29 presidential election to Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, MDC.

It was they who made the controversial decision to stop the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, ZEC, from releasing the result of the ballot.

According to these sources, Mugabe was considering stepping down but was forced to carry on when the military threatened to take over if he resigned.

“Mugabe was willing to step down. He had actually indicated that he would retire to his rural home and his Borrowdale mansion and hand over power to Tsvangirai, if people voted for him,” said one official. “He even said he was willing to surrender his fate to Tsvangirai, to do whatever he wanted with him.

“However, the army generals and commanders told him that if he did [resign], it would leave them with no other choice but to take over the country. What a lot of people have missed is that Mugabe agreed to avoid a bloody coup by the military. It was better him than the military taking over.”

Chiwenga and retired Major-General Paradzai Zimondi, head of the penal service, vowed before the election that they would never salute anyone but him as president. Police chief Augustine Chihuri also said he would not accept an opposition victory.

A day after the election, a crisis meeting of army and security chiefs was held to discuss how to prevent the opposition taking over as it became apparent that Mugabe might have lost to Tsvangirai.

Regime figures do not trust Tsvangirai, fearing that if he came to power he would prosecute senior officials for human rights abuses committed over the years.

Although the ZEC has not announced who won the presidential election, it has said that the MDC won a majority in parliament for the first time ever, defeating ZANU-PF. However, this week the commission has been conducting a recount in 23 constituencies, and there are fears this will provide an opportunity to rig the numbers and reverse the position.

The MDC has accused the security forces of embarking on a campaign of violence and intimidation in the weeks since the election.

In an interview with SW Radio Africa on April 11, Tsvangirai said, “He [Mugabe] has lost control – that is why the military is doing what it is doing, going to interfere with the work of ZEC, arresting ZEC officials, relocating the work of the verification of the presidential ballots to a secret place where our representatives are not present. They have literally overthrown the civilian authority.”

David Coltart, a prominent lawyer and a member of the minority MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara, said, “It’s a coup in the guise of an election.”

Security Minister Didymus Mutasa denied that the military had taken over.

“President Mugabe is still in charge, and that is a fact,” he said. “Those people who are telling you that are wishing for bad things for this country. Wait until the runoff [presidential election]. We will beat them overwhelmingly, and then they will shut up.”

The ZANU-PF officials said security chiefs had called several crisis meetings since the election. At one of them, top military officers gathered two weeks ago at Murombedzi, near Mugabe’s rural home, and told the president they were now in charge.

The military officers, said a ZANU-PF official, laid out a plan by which Mugabe would contest a run-off vote under conditions tipped in his favour by the military taking control of polling stations and counting centres.

The official said Mugabe’s speech on Independence Day on April 18 suggested that he might not be aware of the scale of violence being perpetrated by the army and pro-ZANU-PF militias.

At the independence celebrations, Mugabe paid tribute to Zimbabweans for maintaining peace before, during and after the elections. “Those who are planning violence must stop immediately, otherwise they might be in serious trouble with us,” he said.

According to the MDC, ten of its members have been killed since the election, while dozens of others have been beaten, whipped and threatened by youth militias, war veterans, the military and the security service.

Huts in rural areas have been burnt down, and hundreds of people have been displaced. Victims bearing burns, bruises and serious injuries from some rural areas have been hospitalised in Harare.

The crackdown has come since the JOC took control of the ruling party’s strategy, the electoral system, and internal security measures.

One ZANU-PF member of the Mashonaland Central provincial leadership told IWPR that a meeting held by these local party officials in Bindura agreed unanimously that violence was not the answer. But he added that because the military had taken over, such decisions were not being acted on.

“We have realised in ZANU-PF that things are not good. The problem is that it is now the military that has taken over,” he said.

“It was agreed at that meeting that it was wrong to beat up people. It is not good for the party’s image. But with the army now in charge, all they know is intimidation and violence against opposition supporters. I don’t think that the president really knows what is happening – that people are being tortured and beaten up.”

He said the problem with Mugabe was that he was surrounded by people who did not tell him the truth. The officials said those individuals who could give him honest advice had either died or were no longer in government.

“ZANU-PF is full of new guys or should I say mafikizolos [latecomers] who will not dare say anything. That is why the military can do what it has done,” said the party official. “It is wrong to beat up people, like what is happening in the high-density and rural areas. Violence does not help anyone.”

Nonthando Bhebhe is the pseudonym of a journalist in Zimbabwe.

Cutting Edge
By Priya Abraham
April 21st 2008

To listen to Robert Mugabe’s latest rant on western imperialism, one would think history has not shaken the 84-year-old liberator-turned-dictator of Zimbabwe.

“We need to maintain utmost vigilance in the face of vicious British machinations,” he told a crowd of thousands in Harare’s Gwanzura stadium on April 18, Zimbabwe’s Independence Day. Banners at the stadium further warned against “sell-outs” to Britain.

In reality, Mugabe is facing perhaps the strongest challenge to his power since he took over from white minority rule in 1980. In national elections held March 29—and still under dispute–Zimbabwe’s opposition won control of the nation’s 210-seat parliament, winning 107 seats to the ruling party ZANU-PF’s 97.

Mugabe has now completely lost any remaining legitimacy he held in Zimbabwe and the world. Zimbabwe’s tenacious and beleaguered opposition movement has new hope: “Don’t forget we have won,” wrote Sokwanele, a civil rights coalition, as it urged Zimbabweans to continue pressing for peaceful, democratic renewal. Under this new calculus, the question now is how long Zimbabweans will wait for Mugabe to go.

Mugabe is beyond caring what the world thinks, and that attitude rippled even in Washington circles. Just as an example, His ambassador to the United States agreed to speak at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy, on April 15, then blew off the event as reporters and others waited for his arrival. His staff made little effort to inform anyone that he was “out of town.”
In this election, there is no doubt about the victor: in a slight but profound concession, the country’s 9,000 polling stations were each required to post their results outside. Zimbabweans and civic groups traveled from one polling station to another logging the results for themselves. In previous elections, officials tallied—and tampered with–ballots at a central counting station.

The opposition Movement for Democratic Change, or MDC, also appears to have won the presidency, though Mugabe refuses to release those election results more than three weeks later. Meanwhile, in an effort to recapture the parliamentary seats his party obviously lost, Mugabe has launched a recount in 23 constituencies where the MDC is particularly popular.

With the knowledge of their victory, MDC’s leaders are beginning to sound like leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement. While Mugabe blustered about imperialist threats on Independence Day, MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai told Zimbabweans, “I cannot speak to you on the national media, but I can speak to you from my heart—that freedom comes and your voice and your vote shall be heard.”

Significantly, the election is also uniting the fractured and often weak MDC. Tsvangirai rival Arthur Mutambara, who heads MDC’s splinter faction, has backed Tsvangirai for president and said both camps would act as one body within the parliament. “Under no circumstances will we vote with Robert Mugabe,” he said. “Hell no, never, ever.”

But how long will Zimbabweans hold out for peaceful change? News media continually repeat the grim statistics: Zimbabwe’s inflation is the highest in the world while its life expectancy is the lowest, at 34 for women. One man at an election rally toted a sign with the dry self-description, “Starving billionaire.”

David Coltart is the MDC’s former shadow justice minister and now a leader within the splinter faction, and was elected March 29 as Senator for a southern constituency. On a faint and failing phone connection (lines have been especially faulty since the election), he told me he is skeptical that Zimbabwe will see a popular uprising.

For one thing, Zimbabwe does not have the same “pressure cooker” environment as Kenya, Coltart said, which is surrounded by warring and inhospitable neighbors such as Somalia and Sudan.

Secondly, “Most of our young activists have gone to Zimbabwe and South Africa and so there’s very few people within the country (for) an uprising,” Coltart said. About a quarter of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people have fled across its borders. Zimbabwe’s brutal and drawn out guerrilla war between the white government and black fighters has also left people with “little stomach” to start another armed struggle.

Even an April 15 national strike the opposition called fizzled as riot police took positions and poor Zimbabweans chose to work, desperate for any meager pay. Mugabe has awarded increasing control of the nation’s day-to-day running to his security forces and the dreaded Central Intelligence Organization. In a familiar tactic, security forces and youth squads are now rounding up and beating opposition supporters in a new crackdown, further feeding tensions.

Despite its obvious and clear victory, the fight still is not over for Zimbabwe’s opposition. Instead of finding relief in this election, the MDC is in its usual position of battling Mugabe’s illegal maneuvers. Tsvangirai would like Africa and the world to intervene in Zimbabwe more strongly, as it did when Kenya’s election last year came under violent dispute. In the meantime, Zimbabweans are back to waiting for deliverance from their old and wily liberator.

Priya Abraham is Communications Director at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy.

The Independent on Sunday
By Raymond Whitaker in Bulawayo
Sunday, 20 April 2008

Zimbabwe’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the presumed front-runner in the presidential election held three weeks ago, has said he intends to remain out of the country for the time being for fear of being attacked or imprisoned.

“It is no use going back to Zimbabwe and become captive,” the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader, who left Zimbabwe 10 days after the poll, told Canada’s The Globe and Mail. “Then you are not effective. What can you do? Do you want a dead hero?”

Mr Tsvangirai, who has spent most time recently in South Africa, said he would return, but first wanted to mobilise international support against President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF government. The ruling party lost its majority in the 29 March election, and independent monitoring groups calculate that the MDC leader fell just short of a first-round victory in the presidential poll, securing between 49 per cent and 50 per cent of the vote.

After an initial period of turmoil, Mr Mugabe and his associates have embarked on a clear strategy of seeking to reverse the result of both polls. The result of the presidential election has been withheld, and MDC officials and supporters in Zanu-PF’s former strongholds have been attacked. Some officials of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) have been arrested, along with members of the country’s largest voluntary poll monitoring group.

Yesterday, the nominally independent ZEC began recounts in 23 seats, 16 of which it had previously declared in favour of the opposition. Zanu-PF would regain its majority if the results in nine seats were reversed in its favour, but lawyers have said the exercise, which is expected to last three days, violates electoral procedures, and the MDC has said it will ignore the outcome. “We reject the outcome of this flawed process,” said MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa. “As far as the MDC is concerned, the first results stand. Anything else will be an illegitimate process.” He said it was “clear” that the ballot boxes had been tampered with in the three weeks since polling.

The recounts were being observed by a South-African led team from the Southern African Development Community, but the opposition has been disillusioned by the feeble stance of the organisation and its designated mediator, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Yesterday former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said the situation in the country was “dangerous” and pointedly urged Africa’s leaders to do more. “The recounts remove any doubts about the ZEC being a partisan organisation,” said David Coltart, an opposition senator and constitutional expert. “If they start announcing that someone else has won a seat, it will be illegal. Only a court can decide that a result should be overturned.”

It was clear, Mr Coltart added, that Zanu-PF had known the presidential result since 2 April, when the government-owned Herald newspaper reported that there would be a run-off. The delay since then had removed any claim to legitimacy that the poll could have given Mr Mugabe. “All this amounts to is a rather clumsy coup disguised as an election.”

The US government and the New York-based group Human Rights Watch is among those that have accused the Mugabe government of violent retaliation since the election. Zanu-PF, it said, was setting up “torture camps to systematically target, beat, and torture people suspected of having voted for the (opposition) MDC in last month’s elections”.

According to dissident policemen who have been briefed on the ruling party’s strategy, about 50 constituencies have been targeted for intimidation. The aim was to have mixed groups of police, army officers, Zanu-PF militants and “war veterans” in place for the snap announcement of a presidential election run-off.

The police said they had been ordered to stand by and watch when party youth militia and “war veterans” attacked opposition supporters, to emphasise to the victims that they would receive no protection. The aim was to displace MDC supporters and officials, so that they would not be able to vote when the second round was called. They had also been told that less strict scrutiny would make it easier to stuff ballot boxes.

Meanwhile, a Chinese ship carrying arms to Zimbabwe which was turned away from South Africa is heading to Angola in hopes of docking there. The ship left South African waters on Friday. It is believed to be carrying three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades, and an unknown number of mortar rounds. Mozambique’s transport and communications minister told Reuters that Mozambique has been monitoring the ship’s movements since it left South Africa.

The Boston Globe
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / April 20, 2008

IN RETROSPECT , it was an exercise in naiveté to have imagined that Zimbabwe’s brutal strongman, Robert Mugabe, would relinquish power just because he had lost an election. It has been more than three weeks since the March 29 vote in which Mugabe’s party, known as ZANU-PF, lost control of the lower house of parliament. Yet official results in the presidential contest between Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai have yet to be released.

There isn’t much doubt who won. Public tallies posted at each polling station showed Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, garnering more than 50 percent of the vote. Were the electoral commission to certify those tallies, it would mean Mugabe’s 28 years at the top had come to an end. But the electoral commission, like everything else in Zimbabwe’s government, is controlled by ZANU-PF. So there will be no official results until the books have been cooked to Mugabe’s satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the regime’s thugs have been busy, staging raids against foreign journalists and opposition-party offices, invading farms owned by white Zimbabweans, terrorizing voters in the countryside. US Ambassador James McGee warned last week that Mugabe’s goon squads were carrying out “threats, beatings, abductions, burning of homes, and even murder” in areas where the opposition party ran strong. A group of Zimbabwean doctors say they have treated more than 150 people who had been beaten since the election. Hundreds more have been detained, and the MDC says at least two of its workers have been murdered.

Not for the first time, Mugabe is viciously stealing an election, and not for the first time, the international community is doing nothing to stop him. Particularly feckless has been South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki. More than any other regional leader, he could exert the leverage to force Mugabe to abide by the voters’ decision. He has refused to do so. A week after the election, Mbeki insisted there was “a hopeful picture” in Zimbabwe; several days later he held a friendly session with Mugabe, then declared to the world that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe” – merely a “natural process taking place.”

Is it any wonder that Africa is so often thought of as the planet’s most miserable continent?

“By failing to come together to denounce Mugabe unequivocally,” The Economist concluded, Mbeki and other African leaders “have not only prolonged Zimbabwe’s agony; they have damaged the whole of southern Africa, both materially and in terms of Africa’s reputation.”

Rarely has one man’s misrule so horribly wrecked a country. The MDC’s David Coltart, a member of Zimbabwe’s parliament, surveyed some of the data recently in a study for the Cato Institute in Washington:

In a country once known as Africa’s breadbasket, agriculture has been all but destroyed. Manufacturing has collapsed. So has mining – gold production has fallen to its lowest level since 1907, even as world gold prices soar to record highs.

Thanks to ZANU-PF thuggery, 90 percent of foreign tourism to Zimbabwe has evaporated. Insane economic policies have fueled an inflation rate of well over 100,000 percent. Zimbabweans by the millions have fled the country, and 80 percent of those who remain live below the poverty line. Death from disease and malnutrition has exploded. Life expectancy for men in Zimbabwe has fallen to 37 years – 34 years for women.

Mugabe and his loyalists stop at nothing to ensure their grip on power, Coltart writes. As of 2004, an astonishing “90 percent of the MDC members of parliament elected in June 2000 had suffered some human rights violation; 24 percent survived murder attempts, and 42 percent had been tortured.”

The government, meanwhile, is now accusing Tsvangirai of treason. State-run media claims he was plotting with Great Britain to overthrow the regime. But the real menace is Mugabe, who was preparing at week’s end to receive a 77-ton shipment of Chinese arms, including AK-47 rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and more than 3 million rounds of ammunition. What is he planning to do with so much additional firepower? That, Zimbabwe’s deputy information minister said, is “none of anybody’s business.”

On Thursday, a South African government spokesman belatedly acknowledged that the situation in Zimbabwe “is dire.” Now maybe he’ll say how much more dire it must get before South Africa – or any other country – finally does something about it.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

JOHANNESBURG, April 15 — Zimbabwe’s military has taken day-to-day control of key elements of the national government, limiting the authority of President Robert Mugabe as he struggles to maintain power after 28 years, according to senior government sources, Western diplomats and analysts.

Mugabe’s clout has diminished as military forces deploy widely across Zimbabwe’s countryside and in government agencies. Among those agencies is the electoral commission, which has refused to release results from the March 29 election and would manage a runoff vote, if one is eventually scheduled.

National decision-making increasingly has been consolidated within the Joint Operations Command, a shadowy group consisting of the leaders of the army, air force, police, intelligence agency and prison service — a group Zimbabweans call the “securocrats.”
Although those officials long have been powerful, their authority in government and political matters grew sharply in the days after the election, when it became clear that Mugabe had lost a first round of balloting to longtime opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Several of the securocrats, whose ties to Mugabe date to Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s, had vowed before the vote never to take orders from Tsvangirai, a former trade union official with no military background.

The shift in power is “an interim measure that is meant to stabilize the country at this critical moment,” said a top government official and Mugabe confidant, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The arrangement is just temporary because once he wins [a runoff vote], as the army expects him to, he will be back in charge.”

Zimbabwe’s political crisis has shown no sign of abating since the election 17 days ago. All sides agree that Mugabe received fewer votes than Tsvangirai, but they disagree as to whether the opposition candidate won the clear majority needed for a decisive first-round victory.

The opposition party, which asserts that Tsvangirai did win enough votes to become president, has tried various tactics to push Mugabe’s government from office. It sued unsuccessfully to force release of the results. It embraced a runoff, announced a boycott of it, then reversed again and said it would take part under certain conditions. On Tuesday, it called a general strike only to see it fizzle.

Regional diplomatic efforts, including quiet negotiations between the ruling party and the opposition, have failed so far. There are no official presidential election results, no date for a runoff and no clear path for resolving the crisis. That has made questions about who is in charge now all the more pressing. The constitutional mandate for parliament and Mugabe’s cabinet expired at the end of March.

Opposition leaders have claimed for several days that the military has quietly taken control of the government. “It’s a coup in the guise of an election,” said opposition lawmaker David Coltart, who is part of a breakaway faction that does not answer to Tsvangirai.

Mugabe’s security minister, Didymus Mutasa, disputed Coltart’s description, saying, “President Mugabe is still in charge, and that is a fact. Those people who are telling you that are wishing for bad things for this country. Wait until the runoff. We will beat them overwhelmingly, and then they will shut up.”

Yet a Zimbabwean general, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described a meeting between top military officers and Mugabe last week in Murombedzi, about 55 miles southwest of Harare, the capital. After declaring to the president that they were in charge, the officers laid out a plan by which he would contest a runoff vote in conditions made far more favorable by military control of polling stations and central counting centers, the general said.

He added that the military has assigned two senior officers to oversee each of Zimbabwe’s dozens of local government districts. Their job, the general said, is to coordinate political violence by ruling party groups that are intimidating and attacking opposition supporters.

Two people have died since the election. Dozens of others have been beaten, whipped and threatened by ruling party youth militias, opposition activists say. Veterans of Zimbabwe’s liberation war have occupied many of the remaining white-owned commercial farms. As police checkpoints on Zimbabwe’s highways have proliferated, a growing number are monitored by military policemen or officers of Mugabe’s secret police.

Such harsh tactics were common in previous elections, especially in 2000 and 2002; this year’s vote was generally regarded as less violent. The following day, results were posted at individual polling stations, which allowed both the opposition and independent monitors to compile tallies showing the extent of Mugabe’s loss.

This more relaxed atmosphere, which resulted largely from pressure applied by leaders of other countries of southern Africa, changed in the days after the election. Through increasingly belligerent statements, ruling party figures vowed to defeat Tsvangirai in a runoff and challenged the results of several parliamentary seats they lost.

Seven election officials were arrested, as were several journalists covering the election amid intensive restrictions on news gathering.

This crackdown has come since the Joint Operations Command took operational control of the ruling party’s political strategy and the country’s electoral mechanisms and internal security measures, the senior government sources, diplomats and analysts said. The pretext, they said, is a national security threat posed by a possible victory by Tsvangirai, whom officials long have accused of colluding with Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, Britain, to help it reassert control.

Former Mugabe information minister Jonathan Moyo, who broke with the president and now is an independent lawmaker, said that when he was in the cabinet from 2000 to 2005, major decisions needed the approval of the securocrats, much as a company’s chief executive officer submits major initiatives to a board of directors.

Since the vote, Moyo said, power has shifted from Mugabe, whom he called “a hostage president.” “His role is as a weakened CEO,” Moyo said. “Still CEO, but one who cannot disagree with his boss.”

Media Institute of Southern Africa (Windhoek)
PRESS RELEASE
15 April 2008

A 60-year old Bulawayo woman, Margaret Ann Kriel, was arrested in the city on 10 April 2008 on allegations of practicing journalism without accreditation in violation of the repressive Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), as amended in 2007. She was not formally charged and released until 22 April on Z$100 million (approx. US$3,300) bail.

She is to reside at her given address until the end of her case and was ordered to surrender her travel documents to the Clerk of the Criminal Court.

According to reports from Bulawayo, the court heard that between 14 February and 10 April, Kriel, in the company of Robin Lee Kriel and an unidentified person, carried out interviews at various places in the city and surrounding areas.

Robin Lee Kriel and the unidentified person are still at large, the court heard.

The state alleges that they interviewed Mr David Coltart of MDC-Mutambara and Ms Thokozani Khupe of MDC-Tsvangirai.

They allegedly also interviewed members of the public about the outcome of the elections, who they voted for and how they felt about the situation.

The state will seek to prove that they carried out these activities pretending to be accredited journalists when they were not.
In a case involving two South Africans who were acquitted on similar charges on 14 April, the court ruled that the two had no case to answer under the newly amended AIPPA as practicing without accreditation is no longer an offence because journalists can only be prosecuted on the recommendation of a statutory Media Council, which has not yet been established.

The Star – Joahnnesburg
14th April 2008
By Peta Thornycroft

One of the authors of Zimbabwe’s new electoral laws says next week’s scheduled recount of 23 constituencies will be illegal.

Welshman Ncube, one of two Movement for Democratic Change negotiators who spent much of 2007 locked into rewriting some of Zimbabwe’s contentious laws with Zanu-PF during SA-mediated “dialogues”, on Sunday said Zanu-PF complaints were “concoctions after the fact, to be compliant with the law”.

President Robert Mugabe is widely believed to have lost the presidential election by at least 7 percent and has delayed releasing the results for more than two weeks so that the vote can be “massaged”.
However, Judge George Chiweshe, head of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), claimed on Sunday that Zanu-PF candidates in 23 constituencies had lodged complaints within the prescribed 48 hours after the polls closed, and therefore had not broken the Electoral Act.

The results of the parliamentary elections were public by April 1, having been posted outside polling stations and collected by civic and opposition workers.

No statement was issued by the electoral commission about the complaints nor were competing candidates informed. This is the first anyone outside of the commission or Zanu-PF has heard about the complaints.

According to Judge Chiweshe, “we sat as a commission and considered them (the applications).

“I can’t tell you when we did this at this moment we received them, that is why we ordered recounts we didn’t have to tell the world. Why should we? We are not obliged by law to do that.

“Are you calling me a liar?” he wanted to know.

Ncube labelled Chiweshe a “blatant liar and a fraudster”.

“The ZEC is acting in collusion with Zanu-PF and if they think any of us will believe them when they are a gang of fraudsters, then they can go to hell.

“They are such brazen liars and they have had custody of the ballot boxes for more than two weeks. There is no guarantee that they didn’t go back and tamper with the ballot boxes, so the outcome of the recount is a foregone conclusion.”

He said MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai won a clear majority, which was why the results were not released.

MDC founding secretary for legal affairs David Coltart said: “We have asked for proof the complaints were submitted within the 48-hour period.

“The delay between the expiry of the 48-hour period and the writing of the letters of complaint by ZEC is inexplicable, unreasonable.

“The only inference one can draw from the delay is that the commission has connived with Zanu-PF and therefore acted illegally.

“One would have expected the ZEC would immediately have notified all interested parties, but they took nine days to do so.

“This is a brazen subversion of the Electoral Act.”

Last week a senior policeman with at least 20 years’ experience told The Star that ballot boxes from a Midlands constituency, now due for a recount on Saturday, were brought into police headquarters in Harare on the morning of April 5.

He said five or six young recruits took ballots for the presidential election, marked for Tsvangirai, and replaced them with duplicate ballots marked with an X for Mugabe.

Zanu-PF must win back nine seats to regain parliament.