TENSIONS IN Zimbabwe rose sharply yesterday after the main opposition claimed victory in Saturday's election despite an earlier government warning that such premature claims amounted to an attempted coup, writes Bill Corcoranin Johannesburg.
Even though the vote-counting process was still in its early stages, the Movement for Democratic Change's (MDC) secretary general, Tendai Biti, said yesterday morning the initial results posted at polling stations revealed his party had won.
"We have won this election, we have won this election," Mr Biti told journalists, before revealing calculations which showed party leader Morgan Tsvangirai leading the presidential race with 67 per cent of votes, based on returns from 35 per cent of polling stations.
Mr Biti went on to say the party had won most of the parliamentary seats in their traditional strongholds of Harare and Bulawayo, the country's two largest cities. He said they also won in Mashonaland West and Masvingo districts, in addition to the northeastern town of Bindura, all areas where president Robert Mugabe has previously won.
A spokesman for Simba Makoni, Mr Mugabe's other main rival for the presidency who until a month ago was a senior official in the ruling Zanu-PF party, told the BBC the MDC had "swept the board".
The MDC announcement defied a stern warning from Zimbabwe's chiefs of security - who have already said they will not accept an opposition victory - that such a proclamation would not be tolerated. "It [ a premature announcement of victory] is called a coup d'etat, and we all know how coups are handled," government spokesman George Charamba ominously told the state-owned Sunday Mail. The country's security forces have been on high alert since the eve of the March 29th polling day.
The MDC declaration at its Harare press conference has set up a showdown between it and Zimbabwe's government when the official results are released later today or tomorrow.
The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), the body overseeing the country's general elections, has condemned the MDC's actions. ZEC chief elections officer Lovemore Sekeramayi said, "Those results are not official results of the poll. The official results will be announced to the nation by the commission."
If none of the presidential candidates receives more than 50 per cent of the vote, the top two will face each other in a head-to-head run-off.
The Democratic Alliance (DA) said a Southern African Development Community (SADC) report had concluded that "despite a number of concerns, the elections were a peaceful and credible expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe".
DA parliamentarian and mission member Diane Kohler Barnard said: "It is impossible for this deeply flawed electoral process to be viewed as a credible expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe."
The DA statement said the SADC mission had noted threats by Zimbabwe's security forces to refuse to accept an opposition victory, the use of state resources for political purposes and the presence of police in polling stations. The DA said the elections were "chaotic".
More than 24 hours after the polls closed, only a trickle of results had emerged yesterday. The DA said this fuelled fears the government was rigging the vote. Officials said the delay was caused by the complexity of counting.
Mr Mugabe, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, faced his most formidable challenge in the election from Mr Tsvangirai and ruling ZANU-PF party defector Mr Makoni, who both campaigned on the collapse of Zimbabwe's economy.
"The Mugabe regime is a disgrace to the people of Zimbabwe and . . . to the continent of Africa as a whole," secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to Jerusalem.
Once prosperous Zimbabwe is suffering from inflation of more than 100,000 per cent, chronic shortages of food and fuel, and an HIV/Aids epidemic that has contributed to a steep decline in life expectancy.
(Additional reporting Reuters)