Election workers accused of cheating Mugabe

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was feared to be stepping up his fraudulent campaign to cling on to power with the arrest of five election officials today.

They have been charged with fixing results against the president, an accusation observers say could be part of an attempt to switch more votes to Mugabe.

Although official results of the presidential ballot have still not been declared nearly a fortnight after it took place, independent estimates suggest Mugabe was easily beaten by rival Morgan Tsvangirai.

Zimbabwe’s high court is expected to rule today on an application from Mr Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party demanding the release of the results.

Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party has called for a recount and a further delay in the release of results.

Police said the five officials were accused of giving Mugabe 4,993 votes fewer than were cast for him in four districts.

After an increasingly authoritarian rule during 28 years in power, Mugabe has virtually conceded in private that he did not win, but is using intimidation of his opponents and exploitation of racial tensions to attempt to stay in power.

He has urged Zimbabweans to defend land seized from white farmers in recent years, the state-controlled Herald newspaper said.

“This is our soil and the soil must never go back to the whites,” Mugabe said, referring to whites by the pejorative Shona term “mabhunu”.

He spoke as militants began invading more white farms and demanding the owners leave. Such land seizures started in 2000 as Mugabe’s response to his first defeat at the polls.

Commercial Farmers Union spokesman Mike Clark said at least 23 farms were invaded and the owners of about half of them were driven off their land. He said the farms were in at least seven areas across the country, saying land grabs had “become a national exercise now”.

Mugabe’s land reform program was supposed to redistribute among poor blacks large commercial farms owned by about 4,500 whites that covered 80% of Zimbabwe’s best land. Instead, he used the farms to extend his patronage system, giving them to ruling party leaders, security chiefs, relatives and friends.

Zimbabwe had been a major food exporter until then, but its agricultural sector collapsed and the economy started unravelling. Today, a third of Zimbabweans depend on international food handouts, and another third have fled abroad looking for work or political asylum.

Eighty percent of Zimbabwe’s workers do not have jobs, and the country suffers chronic shortages of medicine, food, fuel, water and electricity as inflation blazes at 100,000% a year.

The elite that still lives in luxury has a vested interest in keeping Mugabe in power. He makes them rich with gifts of land, government contracts and business licenses.

Some also fear an opposition government could bring prosecutions of some Mugabe loyalists, such as security chiefs involved in the 1980s subjugation of the minority Ndebele tribe in which tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

Tsvangirai has expressed concerns Mugabe’s regime will mobilise the armed forces, youth brigades and war veterans to terrorise voters into supporting the president in a run-off election.

While government officials have sought to play down the worries about violence, Mugabe has been accused of winning previous elections through violence and intimidation, with dozens of his opponents killed during the 2002 and 2005 campaigns.