Mnangagwa headed for an outright victory

Very few people probably paid attention to what Stanley Goreraza, former husband of former First Lady Grace Mugabe, said soon after President Emmerson Mnangagwa proclaimed the elections for 30 July.

“I’ll repeat what I have said many times; Emmerson Mnangagwa will never go for an election without strong assurances from the Intelligence Services that he is without doubt going to definitively win that election,” Goreraza said last month.

“They don’t give him a ‘maybe, maybe not’! They give him an affirmative ‘yes’,” he said.

As Zimbabwe goes to the polls today, his main rival Nelson Chamisa of the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance has declared himself a winner and has warned that there will be chaos if the result shows otherwise.

But insiders say Mnangagwa is going to thump Chamisa so hard that his supporters will be shocked, making claims that Chamisa has made all along that the elections will be rigged plausible.

While Chamisa held more than double the number of rallies Mnangagwa held and attracted huge crowds across the country, Mnangagwa has carried out a more effective campaign by reaching voters directly.

While his opponents are talking about “bhora musango” which was used by ZANU-PF legislators in 2008 when Mugabe lost to MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai in the first round of the presidential elections, this year’s “bhora musango” is likely to apply more to Chamisa than to Mnangagwa.

Very few ZANU-PF aspiring legislators are likely to have urged their supporters to vote for them and ditch Mnangagwa as this was quite easy for him to monitor and pin-point where this was happening.

Chamisa, on the other hand, upset so many of his colleagues and supporters that almost 30 stood as independent candidates and are reported to have urged their supporters to vote for them and dump Chamisa.

While most people laughed off Gabriel Chaibva’s poll survey which said that Mnangagwa will win 73 percent of the vote and ZANU-PF will win 180 of the 210 seats, insiders say the party has been targeting not less than 60 percent of the vote for Mnangagwa.

Mugabe won 61 percent of the vote in the 2013 elections.

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