Zimbabwe Elections: Someone must be joking that the votes have not yet been fully counted.

Last Saturday, Zimbabwe held both parliamentary and presidential elections. In the past, the election commission announced these results rather promptly as Pres. Robert Mugabe and his party were the winners. It is also worth noting that Mugabe allowed foreign press and observers into the country to monitor these elections as a sign of his pledge to free and fair elections. For the first time in his 30 years in power, Mugabe banned foreign press coverage and barred international observers from overseeing these elections. As if these elections were not already suspect as it currently stand, the opposition announced that the election commission had printed nine million ballots for a country with a population of only six million. I mean what are the election commissioners thinking? Fifty percent of the population would make a mistake in their choice of president and members of the next parliament. That is a highly unlikely proposition.

As of this entry, the election commission has released the parliamentary results in fashion that could only be described as water torture slow. As for the presidential election, the commission has not announced a date for the release of the results. Many local polling stations have already finished posted the local results for both parliamentary and presidential elections. The opposition has already taken pictures of the posted resulted to ensure that, in the event of any post election violence, the results would not be lost. One has to begin to suspect that Mugabe is using the approximately three million extra ballots to cook the results in his favour. The opposition already said that they believe the dead has voted. The last time I heard the dead rose up from their graves to vote was in 1960 in Chicago. It is obvious that, if the dead did any voting, they voted for Mugabe.

This got be a joke. Who would vote for Robert Mugabe given the current economic environment in Zimbabwe? The annual inflation is 100,000 percent according to IRIN News Services, an agency of the UN Office for Co-ordination of Humantarian Affairs based in Kenya. The Times of South Africa reported Tito Mboweni, the South African central banker, has been seconded to Zimbabwe to bring the latter's super hyperinflation under control. Mboweni said that his inflation target for the medium term was somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 percent. The insane part of Zimbabwe's economic woes is that one US dollar is currently worth almost 30,000 Zimbabwe dollars. The paper currency is practically worthless when the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has announced that it would print for all intent and purposes 10 million Zimbabwe dollar bank notes. Frankly, I am still surprised that the exchange rate between the Zimbabwe dollar against the greenback has not yet reached the hundred of thousands of dollars.

The greed of the Mugabe's government for power and the economic collapse of Zimbabwe are shocking. The economic woes began when Mugabe announced the redistribution of farmland held by white farmers without compensation. The notion of redistribution of farmlands was so unpopular that the majority of people rejected the proposal in a referendum by 55%. Mugabe initially agreed to abide by the will of the people, and then Chenjerai Hunzvi, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Liberation War Veterans Association, invaded the farmland in question. Parliament turned around and approved the very motion that was so soundly defeated in the referendum. The moment the government seized those farmlands and gave it to the black population, agricultural output stopped. This virtually no food in the supermarkets and many Zimbabweans are forced to scavenge for nutrition. That was clearly a move to appease the most militant and extremist fractions within the black community.

Right now, it has gotten to the point of being a joke that the international community, especially the African Union, has not yet began calling for Mugabe to step down. The refusal of the British Foreign Office not to pre-judge these results is laughable. In the event that electoral commission announces Mugabe as the winner, is the British government indirectly suggesting that they would respect the outcome? Frankly, I expected a much stronger response from Zimbabwe's formal colonial masters then what we are getting.