ZIMBABWE:AS SPECULATION ran rife in Harare over the future of president Robert Mugabe, a trickle of parliamentary election results continued to emerge suggesting the prospects of a tight parliament, writes Bill Corcoranin Johannesburg.
Last night, the government had announced results for slightly more than three-fifths of parliament's 210 seats, putting the opposition and ruling party neck-and-neck.
No results have been released for municipal, senatorial and presidential elections.
In terms of parliamentary seats, the ruling Zanu-PF party of Mr Mugabe was ahead with 79 seats to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change's (MDC) 77. A breakaway MDC faction was said to have taken five seats.
As Zimbabweans await the outcome of the election, the focus has been on the official - ostensibly independent - electoral body which has as yet refused to indicate how the three main presidential candidates are polling.
The lack of information from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has prompted widespread concern and criticism in Zimbabwe and abroad of the body, whose board is appointed by and answerable to Mr Mugabe.
The commission is responsible for drawing up the voters' register, overseeing the voting process and counting the ballots.
According to the MDC, it is guided by the president in everything it does.
The opposition party has alleged that, by printing nine million ballot papers for an estimated 5.6 million voters, the commission was facilitating a situation where millions of non-existent voters could be used to vote for Mr Mugabe.
It is not the first time the ZEC's handling of elections has been called into question since the running of elections was handed over to it from the civil service in February 2005.
After the March 2005 general election, the ZEC was accused of facilitating widespread rigging - in several constituencies, more votes were cast than voters on the register. Asked to explain discrepancies by reporters and the opposition, the ZEC refused to respond.
But, while most of the opposition suspect the ZEC remains Mr Mugabe's tool, the MDC's new parliamentarian for Bulawayo, Eddie Cross, argues that the commission has manifested a surprising independence.
"The political masters in Zanu PF tried to force ZEC to declare Mugabe the winner with 53 per cent of the vote and a Zanu-PF majority of 115 seats . . . But, once again, the ZEC has come up trumps - they refused to gerrymander the results and are slowly releasing the final results to the public. This appears to be an effort to give the Zanu-PF people a chance to 'clean house' in advance of what will be a fairly rapid transfer of power once the final figures for the presidential election are announced," Mr Cross argued on his daily blog on Monday.
He maintains that the commission has actually frustrated several attempts by Mr Mugabe to implement last-minute changes to the electoral system. He says the ZEC insisted on the counting being conducted at the polling stations, "which opened the door to the MDC vote count and reporting system, and prevented many of the rigging efforts that had enabled Zanu-PF to dictate the outcome of previous elections".
Only time will tell if his optimism is justified.