The main opposition party claimed outright victory Wednesday for its leader Morgan Tsvangirai, saying he had won 50.3 percent of the vote compared to 43.8 percent for President Robert Mugabe.
The ruling ZANU-PF party rejected the opposition's claims, saying that it would await the full results from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, which has not yet published the outcome of Saturday's presidential poll.
What Tsvangirai may have won is disheartening given the high hopes the world had for Zimbabwe when Mugabe took charge of the new country:
At independence, Mugabe was hailed for his policies of racial reconciliation and development that brought education and health to millions who had been denied those services under colonial rule. Zimbabwe's economy thrived on exports of food, minerals and tobacco.
The unraveling began when Mugabe ordered the often-violent seizures of white-owned commercial farms turned over to blacks, mainly relatives, friends and cronies who allowed cultivated fields to be taken over by weeds.
Today, a third of the population depends on imported food handouts. Another third has fled the country and 80 percent is jobless. Inflation is the highest in the world at more than 100,000 percent and people suffer crippling shortages of food, water, electricity, fuel and medicine. Life expectancy has fallen from 60 to 35 years.
Would the results be in doubt if all those refugees had remained at home to challenge Mugabe? Or perhaps they would have formed a bloc of voters too cowed to do anything but vote for the man who had the guns. I tend to think that their presence would have helped the opposition but perhaps it is called the fight or flight reflex for a reason.
UPDATE: Well, I guess we now know how this is going to play out:
Police raided a hotel used by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change and ransacked some of the rooms. Riot police also surrounded another hotel housing foreign journalists, and took away several of them, according to a man who answered the phone there.
"Mugabe has started a crackdown," Movement for Democratic Change general secretary Tendai Biti told The Associated Press. "It is quite clear he has unleashed a war."
As long as the thugs with guns stay loyal to Mugabe, nothing is going to change. Zimbabwe clearly has room to fall before hitting rock bottom.
