Mugabe predicts a ‘huge victory’ in Zimbabwe election

A DEFIANT Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe predicted a ” huge, mountainous victory” for his party on the eve of a general election that critics have portrayed as a referendum on his increasingly isolated and repressive regime.

“We have never been losers, because we have always been a party of the people,” Mugabe yesterday told more than 10,000 supporters, cheering wildly as music blared in a field in a densely populated neighbourhood of Harare.

Opposition leaders are urging their supporters to go out in numbers tomorrow to show their discontent with years of declining incomes, soaring unemployment and rampant inflation.

The economy has shrunk 50% over the past five years. Unemployment is at least 70%. Agriculture, the economic base of Zimbabwe, has collapsed, and at least 70% of the population live in poverty.

Opposition leaders blame the country’s economic woes on the government’s often violent seizure of thousands of white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans.

Mugabe defends the programme as a way of righting racial imbalances in land ownership inherited from British colonial rule. He blames food shortages on years of crippling drought.

At stake are 120 elected parliamentary seats. Mugabe appoints another 30 seats, virtually guaranteeing his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party a majority.

The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change won 57 seats in the last parliamentary election in 2000, despite what Western observers called widespread violence, intimidation and vote rigging. But it has lost six seats in subsequent by-elections.

In 2002, opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai narrowly lost an equally flawed presidential poll.

While there has been much less violence during this campaign, a coalition of local aid and rights groups said the poll would not be free, fair or legitimate.

“Covert intimidation is still rife, as is the culture of fear,” said Brian Kogoro, chairman of Crisis in Zimbabwe.