Zimbabwe opposition says will reject official election results
HARARE (AFP) — Zimbabwe's opposition will reject official results from a March 29 presidential election that appear to give no candidate an outright majority, a senior opposition figure told AFP on Friday.
"It appears ZEC (Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission) is determined to announce its results that will certainly be rejected by us," Chris Mbanga said on the sidelines of all-party talks hosted by the commission in Harare.
"We will reject simply because we'll not have finished the verification exercise," said Mbanga, an aide to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who claims to have won an outright victory against Robert Mugabe.
Sources present at the closed-door meeting told AFP on the first day of talks on Thursday that election officials said Tsvangirai had had won 47.8 percent and Mugabe had won 43.2 percent.
But the Movement for Democratic Change party presented its own figures claiming Tsvangirai had won 50.3 percent, just scraping past the threshold needed to avoid a second round run-off, the sources added.
"It has already taken ZEC over 30 days to come up with their figures. Why must it take a few minutes to agree on their figures?" Mbanga said.
"There are indeed some very big differences in some constituency results and we are simply saying we want an opportunity to verify them," he added.
