Of course, there was no way the 89-year old wily fox could lose for as long as he breathes. There were complaints about the playing field not being level right from the beginning and the crafty Zimbabwean leader, Robert Mugabe, knew that his rival, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was too trusting and wet behind the ears to call his bluff and SADC too complaisant towards the old geezer to listen to reason.Typical of Mugabe cunning, on July 30 - a day before the elections - electoral laws were brazenly violated when the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), which is unashamedly aligned to the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union - Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), failed to make the voters' roll available for inspection.
But in terms of the law, "The Zimbabwe Electoral Act states that the Commission (ZEC) shall, within a reasonable period of time, shall provide the voters roll and provision of copies to political parties and indeed any interested groups or individuals." Manipulation of the voters' roll began much earlier when millions of youths, a demographic inclined to the MDC, were disenfranchised by simply excluding them from registration. By contrast, in a country with one of the world's lowest life expectancies, thousands of centenarians were registered. In the week before the elections, this degenerate list included the names of people long dead while others were utterly imaginary.
