Daily Trust - the online edition

Zimbabwe and the world are still awaiting the announcement of the March 29 presidential election result by the competent authority. The delay suggests that President Robert Mugabe’s ruling Patriotic Front of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU-PF) is stalling. Having vowed that winning the presidency is a zero-sum game for ZANU-PF, and given the victory in the parliamentary vote of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by Morgan Tsvangerai, a former stalwart of Zimbabwe’s umbrella labour congress, speculation is rife that ZANU-PF is delaying the announcement of the result to buy time to "doctor" it. A crisis of democracy appears to be brewing in yet another African country as Zimbabwe simmers - one too many, in

There is no doubt that Robert Mugabe merits his high esteem among Africans for leading Zimbabwe to independence in the face of stiff opposition from a deeply-entrenched white settler-regime. Perceptive ZANU-PF watchers had long feared however that the party’s petit-bourgeois leadership might abandon its alliance with the workers and peasants, while continuing lip service commitment to the masses, and make concessions to capital after independence in order to emerge as the new ruling class. Mugabe was certainly as anxious at the time to establish his government’s credentials with the financial world as MDC leaders appear to be today. Although he currently excels in bashing the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), the West actually portrayed Mugabe’s government as an African "success story" in the mid-1990s and it even conducted joint military exercises with the United States.

Mugabe borrowed massively from international financiers, expecting that Zimbabwe’s debt service ratio would sharply decline from 16% of export earnings in 1983 to about 4% "within a few years." That was the "sucker-punch," in our view, for the ratio actually spiralled to an untenable 37% by 1987, compelling him to drastically reduce education and food subsidies. Things began to visibly fall apart as the mid-2000 elections approached. Faced with the very real threat of losing parliament to MDC, Mugabe resorted to authoritarian populism and incited a few thousand veterans to revive memories of the liberation war by sacking white-owned farms. Zimbabwe’s macroeconomic situation worsened when he replaced the Rhodesian-era regulatory controls on prices and foreign trade/financial flows in 1991 with the World Bank-endorsed Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). As money drained from the country, the stock market plummeted and manufacturing output declined.

Accusations that ZANU-PF "sold out" is technically justifiable by the steady rise in corruption and the fact that most of the country’s wealth redistributed since 1980 has gone to Mugabe’ s henchmen. Yet to merely cry "sell out" would be profoundly dissatisfactory for downplaying the impact of external financial pressure on Zimbabwe. The harder these pressures bite, the more ZANU-PF leaders are politically wounded, the more ruthlessly they might be inclined to defend their perceived interests. Even they cannot fail to notice however that the Zimbabwean people are increasingly questioning the validity of their policies, as well as the efficiency in pursuing them.

At eighty-six years of age, time is assuredly not on President Mugabe’s side and it behoves the next generation of Zimbabwean leaders to dispassionately assess how far the goals of the country’s liberation struggle have been achieved in twenty-eight years of independence and draw the necessary conclusions. We respectfully advise them, for whatever it might be worth, to minimise the politics of zero-sums.

The country’s electoral commission should immediately release the outstanding result of the Presidential election conducted more than two weeks ago. Attempting to recount the result of the parliamentary election which show that Mugabe’s party lost is a crude way of tampering with the wishes of Zimbabweans.