If you’ve been the autocratic ruler of a country for 28 years and you’ve become accustomed to everyone following your orders, and you thought you had arranged things such that you would win comfortably in the latest elections, but a simple act of addition applied to the numbers released outside polling centres indicates that you are not going to win, what do you do? The answer according to President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe seems to be: arrange for the electoral commission to delay releasing the official results, preferably forever.
Zimbabwe has descended into a state of farce in the wake of the electoral commission’s refusal to announce the results of the elections, presumably at the behest of Mugabe. The next stage after farce is violence, and we can expect to see that escalating in the next week as Mugabe’s Zanu-PF thugs seek to maintain power for the old despot by means of force in a kind of anticipatory coup, now that the people have voted him out of office.
Andy Stanley once said that any use of power for the purpose of maintaining that power is an abuse of power. It is hard to imagine a more clear-cut illustration of that principle than Mugabe. The Zimbabwe High Court now has the difficult choice between dispensing justice and thereby incurring the likelihood of violent retaliation from Mugabe’s henchmen, or denying justice. Either way, it is difficult to imagine an outcome which avoids the threatening storms of brutality.