The Zimbabwean Election Commission still has not announced the official results.
No protests or riots on the ground – yet.
If the results go against Mugabe – will he go quietly?
If he doesn’t, can he be ousted without civil war?
The election commission is going to announce that Mugabe won, people who complain about it are going to wind up in jail, and the rest of the world won’t do very much.
I just realized Mugabe is 84 years old. How much more does he want?
I did not realize it, either, until yesteray. I assume that at the very least, he doesn’t want to end up in a jail or lynched…
And I’m not convinced it’s going to end up as smoothly as ** Captain Amazing ** suggested…
I think things are shaping up such that his own party won’t stand behind him should he try and snatch things. As of now, his party has officially lost the parliamentary election, but it’s looking like Presidential might go to runoff. Holding out some hope for a change, but it’s Africa, so…
Zimbabwe’s High Court is expected to announce a ruling today on a petition to release the official results.
Obama has made a statement, anti-Mugabe. (Dunno about Clinton or McCain.)
Five election officials have been arrested for allegedly undercounting votes for Mugabe.
Having picked Mugabe as one of my 2008 Deathpool choices, I have to admit I’m biased and hope it doesn’t end well for him.
BTW, what exactly does this opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, stand for, other than “We’re not Mugabe!”?
Does anybody know? The Wikipedia article gives me no insight into their politics or platform.
Well, “We’re not Mugabe” is a large part of what they do stand for, but here’s their platform from 2005:
Southern African leaders are having a summit in Zambia this weekend to try to resolve the crisis; both Mugabe and Tsvangirai are “due” to attend. Tsvangirai’s party has ruled out participatig in a runoff vote.
There’s an absolutely huge shipment of arms from China currently sitting in a dock in Durban in South Africa waiting to be offloaded. The manifest includes 3.5m rounds of ammunition for AK47 assault rifles and for small arms, 1,500 40mm rockets, 2,500 mortar shells of 60mm and 81mm calibre, as well as 93 cases of mortar tubes.
To their credit the South African stevedore and trucker unions are refusing to offload or haul anything from the ship.
Mugabe ordered the arms after the election, so it’s blatantly obvious he doesn’t plan on going quietly. So shortly, either he’s going to be standing with his back to a wall or more likely his opponents are.
Can’t help wondering why he even bothered with the charade of an election. Did he perhaps hope that it would just be an accidental, but genuine landslide?
I think Zuma is a charlatan, a man whose sexual escapades indicate a severe lack of critical foresight, a financially inept politician perfectly positioned to implement a powerful yet ultimately destructive system of patronage politics, and is thus unfit to lead this country. But I can now understand why the ANC voted him in as leader. “Anyone but Mbeki” was reputedly the Polokwane mantra.
Whether Mbeki said it or not, “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe” is clearly what he believes.
Both Mugabe and Mbeki must fuck off already. They are both past their sell-by dates.
Well, the ship is moving to Angola to unload.
Now they’re doing recounts. Still refusing to reveal the presidential election results, though. I can’t see any way for this to turn out well, unless Mugabe was counting on that shipment of Chinese arms to stage his crackdown.
He’ll probably distribute those arms to the “war veterans” as soon as they’re in-country, then it won’t matter what the results were. Those “war veterans” will soon be rampaging through Zimbabwe eliminating Mugabe’s political rivals in an apocalyptic orgy of machetes, mortars and machineguns.