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The Zimbabwean, Morgan Tsvangirai has toppled President Robert Mugabe

Silence from post-election Zimbabwe deafening



According to Zimbabwe’s independent newspaper The Zimbabwean, Morgan Tsvangirai has toppled President Robert Mugabe with 58 percent of the popular vote. Tsvangirai received 467,000 votes to Mugabe’s 300,000 in Saturday’s general elections. See The Zimbabwean election results here. There has been no dancing on the streets since word first leaked out that Mugabe had been defeated in election polls. The silence from Mugabe’s fearsome ZANU-PF Party following Election Day is deafening

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Zimbabweans have been there before. They were there in 2003 when two weeks before polling, Tsvangirai was arrested for plotting the assassination of Robert Mugabe, a case Tsvangirai, a bricklayer’s son said the government fabricated against him and two senior party colleagues in a plot to destroy the opposition. Zimbabweans hoping and praying for relief were there, too on March 31, 2005 when Mugabe’s ZANU-PF took over 60 percent of the vote and increased its majority in an election where cheating was said to be rife. Once South Africa’s food basket, starvation, poverty and unemployment mark the lifestyle of the average Zimbabwean and have done so for the last decade. Under Mugabe rule, annual inflation is more than 100,000 with goods and foreign currency not available on the current market. Tsvangirai, the battle worn Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader, did not mince words when he greeted a crowd of about 13,000 people on March 18. “We are all gathered here because of poverty. The main cause of that poverty is one man and he is Robert Gabriel Mugabe,” Tsvangirai said to resounding cheers. “Over the years we have been saying things are tough but now they are really tough. We have come to a time when we are saying enough is enough.” (Stephen Chadenga, March 18, 2008), “In 2000, 2002 and 2005 Mugabe stole the elections from the people. We let him rule then. Now that time is over. When he (Mugabe) rigs the election, he does not rig it from Tsvangirai. He rigs against the people of Zimbabwe. And they have every right to defend their choice.” A key plank in Mugabe’s campaign was the same lament that the opposition leader intends to return acquired land back to white minority farmers. “When we formed MDC in 1999, land reform was on our list of priorities,” Tsvangirai said in Gweru, Zimbabwe’s third largest city. “We have said that prime agricultural land should be fully utilized and this can only be done in a well planned manner. “Look at what Mugabe did to productive land. He grabbed it (land) and resettled people without the necessary implements to farm. Now we see grass, up to my shoulders growing on arable land. “Don’t be fooled by Mugabe that I want to return land to the whites. “Do I look white myself,” he asked drawing laughter from the crowd. Meanwhile the eerie silence from a post-election Zimbabwe comes from a country where the sound of livestock long ago faded from farm and field. It’s a sad and enduring kind of silence from a country where hundreds of thousands of household pets had to be put down by veterinarians forced to search out new lives in other countries.

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Judi McLeod -- Bio and Archives -- Judi McLeod, Founder, Owner and Editor of Canada Free Press, is an award-winning journalist with more than 30 years’ experience in the print and online media. A former Toronto Sun columnist, she also worked for the Kingston Whig Standard. Her work has appeared throughout the ‘Net, including on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

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