2023-08-27 02:15:33
According to the electoral authority, incumbent Emmerson Mnangagwa won the presidential election in South Africa’s Zimbabwe, which was overshadowed by allegations of manipulation. Mnangagwa will be “declared the duly elected President of the Republic of Zimbabwe,” Justice Chigumba, head of the National Electoral Commission (ZEC), told reporters on Saturday. The 80-year-old received 52.6 percent of the votes, his opposition challenger Nelson Chamisa got 44 percent of the votes.
Chigumba said Mnangagwa of decades-ruling ZANU-PF had more than 2.3 million votes, giving him the majority he needed to avoid a runoff. More than 1.9 million people voted for Chamisa of the Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC). According to the electoral commission, turnout was 69 percent.
Zimbabwe’s leading opposition party, the CCC, has rejected the election results. “We will not accept false results,” said the party on Platform X, formerly Twitter. In a preliminary statement that the CCC distributed on the network, the party spoke of “discrepancies” in the information provided by the central election commission. The person responsible for voting for CCC candidate Chamisa refused to sign. We want to check the result. After the partly chaotic vote on Wednesday, the CCC had already accused the government of deliberately manipulating the election.
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On Friday, election observers from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) denounced certain aspects of the presidential and parliamentary elections as undemocratic. The regional block criticized, among other things, the cancellation of opposition rallies, biased reporting by the state media and alleged intimidation of voters. This does not meet “the requirements of the Zimbabwe Constitution, the Electoral Code and the SADC Principles and Guidelines for Democratic Elections,” said the head of the election observer delegation, Nevers Mumba.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa extended the elections by one day because of the delay in voting. The chaos in some constituencies increased allegations of manipulation by the opposition. “This is a clear case of voter suppression, a classic case of Stone Age (…) fraud,” opposition leader Nelson Chamisa said on Wednesday.
Zimbabwe has been ruled by ZANU-PF since gaining independence from Britain in 1980. First, the autocrat Robert Mugabe was in power for 37 years. When the military staged a coup against the head of state in 2017, Mugabe’s deputy, Mnangagwa, also known as “The Crocodile” because of his ruthlessness, came into office. During protests in 2018 after a disputed and violent election won by Mnangagwa, the army fired live ammunition, killing at least six protesters in the capital.
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