This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. Robert Mugabe is apparently

entering phase two in his attempt to hold on in power in Zimbabwe. Already

preparing the country for a runoff election before the votes are even fully counted.

Marion Tupi, policy analyst at Cato's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, believes

that Mugabe simply wasn't prepared for the amount of vote rigging that would be required to defeat the opposition.

In so far as Robert Mugabe and Zano P.F can be set to have lost. One needs to keep in mind that the

opposition has a very slim majority in the lower house of the parliament and the upper house election results we don't

know yet nor do we know who won the presidency or what there will need to be a runoff between Morgan-Songarai and Mugabe.

The reason why the opposition won the elections into the lower house is I think very important to understand.

Robert Mugabe and the Zano P.F have done a great deal in order to rig the elections in their favor. They printed 3 million extra

ballots. They retained tens of thousands of people, dead people on the

voting roll. They've distributed the the voting station in such a way that there were far too few polling stations in

the urban areas where the supporters of the opposition live and very many polling

stations in the rural areas where the ZANOPF supporters live. In other words, they've done whatever

they could in order to rig the result of the lower house elections as well.

The reason why the MDC won the lower house elections is that the

gap between what the government was prepared for in terms of rigging and the very

low number of votes they received was simply too large to close.

And so based on that, we have to be very cautious about a predicting and second relying on Mugabe

loss in the presidential actions as well as in the runoff in three weeks time.

Now before the final results have been tallied by the central government, Mugabe is already sort of pushing for this runoff before it's even known whether or not he's won or lost.

Yes, quite remarkably, the BBC and the CNN ran a story for a while on Tuesday I think it was that Mugabe was ready to go but today is Friday and we know that the governing Politbiro of the Zano P.F met and endorsed Mugabe as their candidate for a runoff

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