|
April 17, 2008 After failing to mobilise
demoralised workers to stay home to press for the release of
last month's presidential election results, Zimbabwe's
opposition is now left with few options as seeks to put pressure
on embattled President Robert Mugabe to concede defeat.
The opposition has suffered a series of
setbacks after the brief celebrations of the purported end to
the veteran leader's 28-year uninterrupted rule.
Mr Mugabe's reign had looked dead and
buried following speculation that he had secretly conceded
defeat in elections held on March 29.
However, a violent crackdown on opposition
supporters led by veterans of the country's liberation war and a
cowed judiciary seem to be helping one of Africa's longest
serving dictators to live another day.
The opposition Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC) defeated the ruling Zanu PF in the parallel
parliamentary elections and ended Mr Mugabe's 28 years of
unbridled power.
The 19-day delay in releasing the
presidential election results has created anxiety among
Zimbabwe's neighbours, who fear that political unrest will also
affect them.
Zimbabweans are also slowly losing hope
that an end to their long suffering is near. There is also
mounting regional concern that the Zimbabwean crisis is edging
towards a disaster. South Africa's ruling African National
Congress yesterday broke ranks with the country's President
Thabo Mbeki and described the situation in Zimbabwe as
worrisome.
Mr Mbeki, who was mandated by an urgent
Southern African Development Conference (SADC) meeting over the
weekend to bring the warring parties together, said there was no
crisis in the country.
These pronouncements and SADC's failure to
condemn the delays in the release of the results cast serious
doubts that there would be a regional solution to the Zimbabwean
problem.
Things got worse for the MDC on Monday,
when a High Court Judge threw out its application seeking to
force the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to release the
results.
MDC lawyer, Mr Andrew Makoni said the High
Court judgment meant that the electoral body could release the
results whenever it wanted, regardless of its constitutional
obligations to publish the outcome within a reasonable period.
"(The court) has given the Zimbabwe
Electoral Commission a blank cheque," he said. "We don't know
when the ZEC will be ready with results. We don't know what
specific time would be reasonable in the eyes of the court."
Analysts say the MDC showed too much faith
in the first place by approaching a judiciary dominated by
Mugabe's loyalists.
Former High Court judge Justice Benjamin
Paradza, a former freedom fighter who was hounded into exile by
Mr Mugabe's government, says Monday's judgement showed that
Zimbabwe no longer had an independent judiciary.
"I am shocked that a court of law can make
a finding on the basis that the result cannot be published
before all anomalies are investigated," he said. "If that is
what the ZEC was doing all along, why did they not just say so?
"And for the High Court to buy that sort of argument without
taking the ZEC to task smells of shameful interference and
complicity between the ZEC and Zanu PF. "To be part of such a
disgraced justice system makes me shudder in fear of what will
ever happen to our people."
Violent land
seizures
During the violent land seizures that
began in 2000, Mr Mugabe purged the country's judiciary system
and appointed ruling party loyalists to the bench.
"This (mass stayaway) seems the most
immediate option that the MDC has after all the other
gentlemanly strategies: going to court, approaching the SADC and
talking to the ZEC, failed," said Mr Lovemore Matombo, the
secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions.
But it now appears many Zimbabweans
suffering under the weight of the world's highest inflation and
alarming poverty levels chose to put daily survival ahead of the
strike action.
"Strikes in Zimbabwe are longer effective
because only 20 per cent of the population is employed," said
Henry Palmer, a small-scale miner on the outskirts of Harare.
"Businesses are also afraid of losing their licences if they
close when strikes are called because the government has become
very vindictive."
Meanwhile, South African ruling party
leader Jacob Zuma widened his disagreement with President Thabo
Mbeki over Zimbabwe today, saying anxiety was increasing by the
day over post-election deadlock.
Mr Zuma made his toughest comments yet on
the delay in issuing election results in Zimbabwe as members of
the UN Security Council and the African Union met in New York
where they were expected to debate Zimbabwe, Sudan and Somalia.
Mr Mbeki, increasingly isolated in his
softly softly approach to Zimbabwe and his insistence there is
no crisis there, is chairing the meeting at UN headquarters as
rotating Security Council president. He wants to block
discussion of Zimbabwe.
Mr Zuma said in a speech near
Johannesburg: "The region cannot afford a deepening crisis in
Zimbabwe. The situation is more worrying now given the reported
violence that has erupted."
Mr Zuma ousted President Mbeki as leader
of the African National Congress last December and has moved
gradually to increase his influence at the expense of his rival.
"We once again register our apprehension about the situation in
Zimbabwe.
The delay in the verification process and
the release of results increases anxiety each day," Zuma told
South Africa's Chambers of Commerce.
In another confirmation of Zimbabwe's
collapse, the central statistics office said on Wednesday
inflation, already the world's highest, had jumped to almost
165,000 per cent in February. |