Posted on 05/04/2008 5:51:22 AM PDT by Clive
Dear Family and Friends,
It took the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission almost five weeks to verify less than two and a half million votes that were cast in our Presidential ballot. In a country where junior school children have learnt to count, add, subtract and even multiply in millions and now billions in order to survive our collapsed economy, five weeks is insulting and highly suspicious to say the least.
After five weeks the ZEC declared the following results:
Morgan Tsvangirai: 1,195,562 votes (47,9%)
Robert Mugabe: 1,079,730 votes (43,2%)
Simba Makoni: 207,470 votes ( 8,3%)
Langton Towungana: 14,503 votes ( 0,6%)
ZEC went on to declare that since no candidate had received more than 50% of the votes cast, a run off election must be held at a date yet to be announced.
In the five weeks while ZEC were 'verifying' those two and a half million Presidential votes, the country has come to a virtual standstill: lives and businesses have been on hold and we have waited and waited and waited. In between the daily 16 hour electricity cuts we have followed every rumour, whisper and news bulletin. We have scrambled for precious newspapers and crowded around short wave radios for any information. It has also been a brutal five weeks filled with fear, violence and retribution. More than twenty people are dead, hundreds are injured, thousands have been left homeless and everyone has seen the horrific images of people with broken limbs, bloodied, bruised and burnt bodies.
Many are calling this the rural Murambatsvina and when you see the pick up trucks overflowing with people coming into towns from the rural areas you know why. The faces are gaunt, the eyes frightened and a weary, grey exhaustion surrounds the images to all who care to see.
The American Ambassador to Zimbabwe, James McGee, said he was personally recording incidents of violence and interviewing victims. Mr McGee said: "We are looking and taking note of the people responsible for the violence. Out of the 500 cases that I have handled, only one has been attributed to the MDC as an aggressor. We have affidavits; we have the names of the perpetrators. We know the perpetrators and there will be justice at the end of the day."
In these five weeks, aside from the fear and exhaustion, daily life for all Zimbabweans has reached ever more desperate levels. When we voted on March 29th a loaf of bread was 7 million dollars; last week it cost 40 million dollars; this week it is almost impossible to find. A friend who takes life sustaining drugs paid 345 million dollars for her tablets at the end of March. Just five weeks later the same tablets cost her 4.6 billion dollars.
As I write it is not yet known if Morgan Tsvangirai will take part in a second election. Whatever the MDC decide, the ordinary people of Zimbabwe know one thing : the MDC won the 2008 elections; they won a parliamentary majority and their candidate got more votes than Mr Mugabe in the presidential count. For the first time in 28 years Zimbabweans have begun freeing themselves from the clenched fist of Zanu PF. Real courage, real bravery and a decade of intolerable hardship has finally guided their hands in the ballot boxes. Zimbabwe will never be the same again.
Until next time, thanks for reading, love cathy.
There ought not to have been a run-off and Tsvangirai ought to have been declared President.
There is no way that Mugabe, Zanu PF and their tame Election Commission is going to allow anyone but Mugabe to win the run-off.
The massive thuggery and murder by police, "war veterans" and the military is simply their subtle ways of warning about the consequences of voting the wrong way.
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Maybe Mugabe can learn from U.S. union organizers. Just do away with the secret ballot!
I was thinking the same thing.
Ah, for the good old days when the country was known as Rhodesia and nobody starved to death.
Another few years of this and there will be nothing left. Just a few wandering tribes living in mud huts. Say, isn't that what was there before the evil white men showed up?
McGee is a product of Western morality. He thinks the good people can appeal to the conscience of the bad people. Idiot.
Actually, a pole-and-dagga house can be quite cozy.
Pretty much, except that they were farmers and didn't do all that much wandering, except during their genocidal wars.
From what friends that were in RLI have told me about the climate it sounded very tolerable. Warm but not too hot in the warmer season and his house did not even have air conditioning. They would just open windows to let in a breeze.
Which is why I find a certain irony in the Zanu PF that the commercial farmers were holding the "best land in Zimbabwe". It was only the aforesaid capital, technology and expertise along wihth sweat equity that made it so,
A fact amly demonstrated by the results of the farm invasion is that the only people who knew how to farm the veldt were the commercial farmers and their employees.
When the land forcibly taken from the commercial farmers it was not given to the employees. They joined the volkerwanderung that eventually swept up one quarter of Zim's former population. The best land was given to Zanu PF party cadre and the rest of it was given to people who, at best, only knew how to farm alluvial soil with a nearby handy source of water.
The new Zanu PF party landholders acquired the nickname "cell phone farmers" because they were essentially city dwellers with city jobs and would only be seen on the land on weekends, usually talking all the while on cell phones.
Righto.
Much the same thing happened in Uganda when Amin expelled the Indians.
He gave their little stores to his cronies, who promptly sold off all the stock, frittered away the proceeds without restocking, and then had no capital with which to keep the business in operation.
Even the thieves got no lasting benefit from the theft.
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