Magic Statistics

Over a month after the presidential election, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) finally released official results: Incumbent thug president Robert Mugabe received 43.2 percent of the vote, while Morgan Tsvangirai won 47.9 percent.  Both men have now announced they will contest a run-off election.

Mr Tsvangirai and his supporters in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) have long maintained that he won the election outright with over 50 percent of the vote, but the ZEC appears to have short-circuited that claim by selectively leaking the results.

[T]he presidential election candidates or their agents yesterday met Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) officials to tackle the crisis triggered by the withholding of results — more than a month later — due to a demand by President Robert Mugabe for a recount of the votes.

Yesterday’s emergency meeting took place against a backdrop of a fresh problem sparked off by ZEC’s leakage of official results to defeated Zanu PF leaders who in turn passed them on to the international media in a bid to sustain their pursuit for a run-off.

ZEC and Zanu PF were anxious to ward off mounting pressure for results to come out and build a case for a run-off, especially against a background of MDC’s claims that Tsvangirai had won the election outright.

MDC claims that the ruling Zanu-PF party and state security forces have already unleashed a campaign of violence and intimidation in hopes of bolstering Mugabe’s chances in the run-off.

The run-off election must be held within 21 days of the official announcement of first-round results.

Previous related posts:

• It’s official: Zimbabwe’s ruling party has lost Parliament
• Zimbabwe opposition claims victory

Trenchant insights from one of the great social philosophers of the late 20th century:

The unexpectedly rigorous business of bringing up children exposed me, as it necessarily exposes almost any parent, to our "child-centered" society's icy indifference to everything that makes it possible for children to flourish and to grow up to be responsible adults.  To see the modern world from the point of view of a parent is to see it in the worst possible light.  This perspective unmistakably reveals the unwholesomeness, not to put it more strongly, of our way of life: our obsession with sex, violence, and the pornography of "making it"; our addictive dependence on drugs, "entertainment” and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and familial ties; our preference for "nonbinding commitments"; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we "impose" our morality on others and thus invite others to "impose" their morality on us; our reluctance to judge or be judged; our indifference to the needs of future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction, and a deteriorating environment; our inhospitable attitude to the newcomers born into our midst; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the propaganda for unlimited abortion, that only those children born for success ought to be allowed to be born at all.

Source: Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York and London: Norton, 1991), pp. 33-34.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Very Lord Scott the Careless of Waterless St Mildred Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

h/t: Rev (aka Bishop Lord James the Surprised of Hope End) at 2 Worlds Collide