afrol News, 31 March - Zimbabwean Minister of Justice, Patrick Chinamasa, has become the first senior official of the ruling Zanu-PF of President Robert Mugabe to lose a parliamentary seat. Chinamasa has lost his Manicaland seat to the opposition.

Over a million Zimbabweans went to the polls on Saturday, but delays in announcing results have raised suspicions that the government wanted to rig the polls.

The main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) claimed it had won the presidential polls with 60% against President Mugabe's 30%. The party relied on unofficial results it claimed to have collated from its agents across the country.

“From the 128 constituencies whose results we have calculated so far, we have 96 out of the 128 [parliamentary] seats and Morgan Tsvangirai is at 60%, Robert Mugabe is at 30%,” MDC Secretary General, Tendai Biti, told journalists in the capital Harare.

The party said it has swept polls in both presidential and legislative polls.

But the government swiftly reacted to the opposition claims, warning that any early claim of victory would be an "attempted coup." It accused the MDC leadership of "preparing its supporters to engage in violence by pre-empting results, claiming they had won."

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) also rubbished the MDC claims, describing them as "baseless speculation." The commission has just began releasing results, which saw Zanu-PF and MDC 12 seats apiece in the parliamentary seats.

ZEC is yet to issue presidential results. It blamed delays in announcing results on the complexities of running four elections - presidential, parliamentary, senatorial and local government - at the same time. The MDC said the delay was a calculated attempt to fix the vote in favour of Mr Mugabe.

The electoral commission has promised to release all the results within two days.

An election monitoring group from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) issue a report on Sunday, saying the general election was "a peaceful and credible expression of the will of Zimbabweans."

Jose Marcos Barrica, Angolan Sports Minister, who heads the SADC mission, said observers had however raised some concerns about access to the state media, voter education and comments by security chiefs.

"Notwithstanding the concerns highlighted, the elections have been a peaceful and credible expression of the will of the people of Zimbabwe," he said.

"We saw a much better turnout than we ever imagined," Barrica said.

"People were predicting that there would be violence on polling day, that there would be bloodshed and that no-one would go to the polls but I must say that we all witnessed people going peacefully to vote. There was no violence."

The MDC opposed the SADC report and accused the mission of the 14-member grouping of sharing the same opinions of the electoral commission well before the results were finalised.

By staff writer

© afrol News

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