MDC-T plans poster campaign against Mugabe poll win

Zimbabwe's opposition MDC-T party, landslide loser of last month's general election, plans to plaster the country with posters to back up its claim that President Robert Mugabe stole the vote in an effort to rally support for a re-run, a senior party official told FFZE on Wednesday.

Douglas Mwonzora, MDC-T spokesman, said the party will also distribute copies of the election fraud dossier that it plans to hand to leaders of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) during its upcoming regional summit in Malawi.

The MDC-T's leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has denounced the ZANU-PF victory in the July 31 election as fraudulent and applied to the Constitutional Court for a re-run. The party believes that distributing fliers and copies of its fraud dossier will win the support of ordinary Zimbabweans for its re-run call. 

"We are printing shorter versions of the dossiers for all Zimbabweans to access them. We are also making flyers and posters to distribute to millions of Zimbabweans whose votes were stolen. They deserve to know what was done and what should be done to reverse this fraud," Mr Mwonzora said.

Police continue to maintain a heavy presence across the country and have warned against any street marches and demonstrations to protest the election outcome.

Mr Mugabe's party won 61 percent of the vote, to MDC-T's 34 percent, giving it a two-thirds majority in the 210-seat parliament for virtual rule by decree. The 89-year-old leader has dismissed Mr Tsvangirai's accusations, and in a speech on Monday said his opponents should "go hang" if they do not accept his victory.

A 20-page MDC-T dossier contains evidence of irregularities that Mr Tsvangirai argues resulted in Mr Mugabe and ZANU-PF stealing their way to victory, Mr Mwonzora said. These include use of fake ballots papers, manipulation of the voters' roll, and the turning away of up to a million voters mostly in urban areas where MDC-T support is strongest.

The party's secretary general, Tendai Biti, said on Wednesday that the dossier also shows how hundreds of Congolese and Sudanese refugees at Tongogara Refugee Camp in Chipinge, as well as Mozambican nationals, were taken to polling stations to vote for ZANU-PF.

"In Harare East we had 6,000 or so new people registered in Chikurubi, but we were denied access of verifying physically the authenticity of these new voters. In some of our affidavits, it is clear that some of the imported persons were from refugees camps or even Mozambique," Mr Biti told FFZE.

Mr Mugabe on Tuesday promised to act on his populist election promises to cancel electricity and water bills for ordinary Zimbabweans and to increase civil servants' salaries and allowances for war veterans – pledges that analysts said are unplanned and will further strain the struggling economy.