Zimbabwe rejects bid to overturn poll result

Bloomberg

Zimbabwe’s top court dismissed the main opposition’s bid to overturn the results of last month’s disputed presidential election.
The ruling confirms the victory of incumbent President Emmerson Mnangagwa, a 75-year-old former spy chief who has wooed international investors as part of his pledge to rebuild an economy devastated by decades of former President Robert Mugabe’s autocratic rule.
A nine-member panel of Constitutional Court judges found the Movement for Democratic Change’s challenge failed to provide evidence of irregularities in the vote, Chief Justice Luke Malaba said in the capital, Harare. There is no avenue for appeal under Zimbabwean law.
“It is alleged there was rigging,” Malaba said. “The applicant made several allegations against the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission. No proof or evidence was adduced by the applicant.”
Mnangagwa will now have to administer an economy in meltdown after two decades of misrule and corruption under Mugabe, who the ruling party forced to resign in November, and a broke Treasury that’s unable to service its loans or take out new ones. That will leave little scope to improve government services, rebuild crumbling infrastructure and meet a plethora of other election pledges.
He’ll also have to unify a nation that’s split down the middle between supporters of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, and the opposition. Mnangagwa won the presidential vote with 50.8 percent of the ballots, a shade more than the majority needed to avoid a run-off.
“Zimbabwe has the most polarised electorate on the continent and Mnangagwa needs to heal that,” Eldred Masunungure, a professor of politics at the University of Zimbabwe, said by phone. “There is need for a political formula to heal Zimbabwe.”
The MDC said that while it disagreed with some of the court’s findings, it would respect the decision.