Zimbabwe’s President Robert
Mugabe was on Saturday officially returned for a seventh term in
office, amid claims of electoral fraud.
Mr Mugabe, 89, won 61% of the vote, against Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s 34%.
Mr Tsvangirai earlier said the elections for parliament and president were fraudulent and promised to take legal action.
He said his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) would no longer work with Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party.
The two parties have been working together in a coalition since the last election in 2008 sparked widespread violence.
Mr Mugabe has been president since Zimbabwe won independence from the UK in 1980.
The European Union, which
maintains sanctions on Mr Mugabe and his senior aides, said it was
concerned about “alleged irregularities and reports of incomplete
participation” in the election.
The largest group of domestic
monitors, the Zimbabwe Election Support Network (ZESN), had said
problems with voter registration had left up to one million people
unable to cast their ballots, most of them in MDC strongholds.
However, the African Union and SADC broadly endorsed the election, saying it was free and peaceful.
On Saturday , one of the nine members of the election commission resigned over the way the election was conducted.
Commissioner Mkhululi Nyathi
said in his resignation letter: “While throughout the whole process I
retained some measure of hope that the integrity of the whole process
could be salvaged along the way, this was not to be.”
