According to the Guardian the people of Zimbabwe are getting jobbed (again):
A crisis meeting of Robert Mugabe’s security cabinet decided to block the opposition from taking power after what appears to have been a comprehensive victory in Zimbabwe’s elections but was divided between using a military takeover to annul the vote and falsifying the results.
Diplomatic and Zimbabwean sources who heard first-hand accounts of the Joint Operations Command meeting of senior military and intelligence officers and top party officials on Sunday night said Mugabe favoured immediately declaring himself president again but was persuaded to use the country’s electoral commission to keep the opposition from power.
The commission began releasing a trickle of results yesterday, more than 36 hours after the polls closed, but the opposition Movement for Democratic Change said it believed the count was being manipulated.
I feel for all the democrats of Zimbabwe. I hope they somehow prevail and are allowed to take the power they’ve earned at the ballot box.
— Yet.
We’re pretty damn close though, given that Fox News calls all our elections since 2000, thank you very much!
The polls in Zimbabwe are pointless.
They serve to once again validate the opposition’s right to rule, but that has happened so many times in the past already that I’m ashamed to say I hold little hope for transition to a new regime.
Official line will be that the rural regions went for the President in great numbers and he won handily as a result. Just like last time and the time before.
The fact that the opposition is working in coordination with foreign media is a difference (‘we so won in a landslide!’), but until Mugabe feels a gun cocked at his head, he goes absolutely nowhere. And where is the RSA in all of this? I guess the rainbow of freedom stops at it’s borders. Sounds weird, but the South African regime’s relationship with Mugabe is not on the side of freedom (calling Mr. Mandela), a sacrifice upon the altar of African self-reliance and the interests of RSA and European mining interests.
How can you steal something that is already in the public eye?
— Thoko Khupe, the vice president of the MDC (the larger of 2 main opposition parties)
We’ll see Mugabe’s best answer to that question in the coming days.
I’m assuming your title is your April Fool’s joke. My cynicism may be back, but I can forsee a day within the next month when Clinton turns into Mugabe and declares herself the nominee, just like when Bush declared himself the POTUS.
So of course we can now expect Bush to invade Zimbabwe in order to spread democracy and to remove a brutal dictator, yes?
Just as soon as the Zimbabwean gov’t figures out how to turn dust into oil.
Diamonds, gold, platinum = Zim Oil
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See my diary – Breaking News – Mugabe to Resign
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."