Zimbabwean citizens (including a surprising number of centenarians and more than a few dead people) are casting their vote on Wednesday.
Despite the opposition's fighting talk - not real fighting, that's a ZANU-PF specialty - President Robert Mugabe looks like he's got this one in the bag, with SADC and the AU firmly in his corner.
Let's get one thing out of the way first: this election is not going to be free and fair. This election is not going to be credible.
This election is not going to be transparent, or acceptable, or whatever other linguistically and morally ambiguous adjective the African diplomatic community will coin to condone its results (so far, African Union Commission chairwoman Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has gone plumped for satisfactory, as in "the [election] preparations were satisfactory", an insupportable conclusion which makes me question my admiration for her).
Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe's long-suffering finance minister and a very senior opposition figure, wearily offered a few more accurate adjectives in an interview with Al Jazeera: "I have said it and I have said it again and I am beginning to sound like a broken record now, but these elections are illegal, illegitimate, immoral, unfree and unfair."...
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There were about 6.2 million registered voters on the voters list. We're told that over 2 million of those names were of dead people, leaving 4.2 million to elect the president of Zimbabwe. However the local NGO network estimates that about another 1 million registered urban voters were prevented from voting because their names did not appear on the voters list. That leaves 3.2 million people to elect the president in a country where most people seem to want change. Mugabe supporters are claiming that he has won a higher percentage than the 70% that he win in the election of 1980. 70% of 3.2 million voters is a little over 2 million, and… WHAT A COINCIDENCE?… There were about 2 million extra ballots printed by the ZEC! I wonder if the ZEC can show the world 2 million unused ballot papers? I doubt it. Mugabe will claim that those asking to see them are just sore losers.