03 August 2018•Update: 04 August 2018
By John Cassim
HARARE, Zimbabwe
The election commission late Thursday declared incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa of the ruling ZANU PF as the winner of Monday’s polls with 50.8 percent votes.
His close contender Nelson Chamisa, leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) and presidential candidate of a seven-party alliance, garnered 44.9 percent votes.
The result was enough for Mnangagwa to avoid a presidential run-off in accordance with the country’s constitution.
Mnangagwa, a 75-year-old former spy chief who succeeded Robert Mugabe in November after a military coup, secured a comfortable victory with 2.46 million votes while 40-year-old Chamisa, who succeeded late Morgan Tsvangirai in February this year, received 2.15 million votes.
Chamisa rejected the results, calling it a “fiction”. Despite his party losing the parliamentary polls, he claimed he did very well in the presidential race.
“I won the presidential elections despite our party losing the parliamentary polls, in areas where Mnangagwa’s parliamentary candidate would win, I was actually doubling that figure,” he said.
Meanwhile, the situation in Zimbabwe remains tense. Earlier in the week, soldiers shot and killed six people when MDC-T youths took to the streets of the capital. More than 20 others were injured while 18 people were arrested after a raid of the MDC-T Harvest House in Harare.
Despite an election victory in parliamentary and presidential polls, Mnangagwa faces an uphill task of turning around the Southern African economy which for decades has been affected by serious liquidity crisis.
