Zimbabwe Opposition Party Urges Neighboring Countries to Oversee New Elections
In a rebuttal of last week’s elections, which saw President Emmerson Mnangagwa win re-election and his long-ruling ZANU-PF party retain its majority in a vote lambasted by international observers, Zimbabwe’s biggest opposition party sought on Tuesday new elections overseen by neighboring nations.
At a press conference in the nation’s capital, Harare, Citizens Coalition for Change deputy spokesman Gift Siziba stated that the party will “not settle for less.”
If the CCC has informed the regional organizations that sent observers to Zimbabwe—the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union—of its demand, Siziba declined to disclose.
Both Namibian President Hage Geingob and neighboring South African President Cyril Ramaphosa have previously congratulated Mnangagwa’s administration on the elections. According to his administration, Ramaphosa had “taken note” of the election monitors’ reports.
After the electoral commission declared former guerrilla warrior and “the crocodile” Emmerson Mnangagwa had won a second five-year term with 52.6% of the vote on Saturday, CCC leader Nelson Chamisa called the election a “blatant and gigantic fraud.” According to the commission, Chamisa obtained a 44% victory.
Going to court would be a repetition of 2018, when Chamisa filed a lawsuit after narrowly losing to Mnangagwa in the first election following Robert Mugabe’s overthrow in a coup.
Chamisa’s appeal was denied by the Constitutional Court. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, two international human rights organizations, claimed there had been a crackdown on the opposition in the run-up to the election.
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Zimbabwe Election Unrest
They asserted that the Mnangagwa government and the ruling party utilized the police and courts as weapons to apprehend opposition members, forbid and disperse opposition party rallies, and frighten their followers. On what critics of the administration claimed were fabricated charges, more than 40 local poll observers were detained throughout the election.
Voting continued into Thursday during the real election last Wednesday due to a lack of ballots, particularly in the capital and other urban areas, which are strongholds of the opposition. To ensure they could vote, people slept at the polling places.
Mnangagwa’s officials have responded strongly to reports from African and Western observation groups claiming that the elections did not adhere to the highest principles of democracy. The Carter Center and the European Union both spoke of an intimidating environment and expressed concern about the potential for some voters to lose their right to vote.
Mnangagwa responded by claiming that some of the observers had crossed “their limit” by contesting legislation that Zimbabwe’s parliament had approved in the run-up to the election.
There are no indications of turmoil in the nation, and on Tuesday, central Harare was bustling with merchants again after two days of silence as residents avoided the streets out of concern for the violence that has often characterized Zimbabwean elections.
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Source: ABC News
