Late on Saturday afternoon – after another long day of waiting for election results – the power went off. To be accurate, I was working through the last batch of Senate results released by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (the zzzzzzzzzz.. elections, what elections?, commission) when the lights went out.

Normally power cuts in Zimbabwe are so common that they’re quite unremarkable. But this time, I was more concerned than usual. Why?

Well, true to their word, the Zimbabwe government managed to secure additional power supplies from some gullible nation (Mozambique I believe) to keep the lights on whilst the nation voted in the harmonized elections held on March 29, 2008. Since then the power had stayed on – maybe to make sure there was no hitch in the counting of the votes (ha,ha!). Seems like the ZEC has been blinded by the light because 8 days later they still haven’t announced the result of the presidential election.

Anyway, when the power went out on Saturday night I thought, “Oh no, ZEC has rigged the final result and announced Mugabe as the winner”. Lights out Zimbabwe. Or for those of us from a previous era – Tilt! Game Over.

This entry was posted on April 6th, 2008 at 8:22 pm by Brenda Burrell and is filed under Elections 2008, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.