February 15, 2000
Rangarirai Shoko
PANA Correspondent
HARARE, Zimbabwe (PANA) - In a surprising electoral rebuff to President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwean voters have rejected his government's new draft constitution in a weekend referendum, with the opposition snatching 55 percent of the vote and the government 45 percent.
This means the "Vote NO" campaigners of the opposition received 698,000 votes against 578,000 for the "Vote YES" advocates of the government, polling officials said Tuesday.
The referendum is widely seen as a rehearsal for the upcoming general elections scheduled for April.
The opposition, a coalition of political parties and human rights groups, campaigned against the draft constitution on the grounds it still gave Mugabe overwhelming executive powers which they accused him of abusing.
The government, which has never been defeated in a national poll since independence in 1980, told voters the draft document would remove current legal hurdles to land reform, among other impediments.
The opposition took an early lead Monday when vote counting began, and maintained this Tuesday when all the votes were counted.
"This has sent a chill down the spine of the government, and there must be panicking all over in their camp. Surely they didn't expect it, neither did I," a teacher of political science at the University of Zimbabwe, said.
"This has come at a wrong time for them because we have general elections in two months and they have no time to look at (and correct) their mistakes," he added.
The government and many political analysts expected Mugabe to garner overwhelming electoral support in the rural areas, his party's traditional stronghold, to neutralise the opposition's lead in urban areas, but this failed.
Many rural voters voted against the draft constitution, a rebellion against the authorities which has baffled political analysts as well as the opposition itself.
Human rights activists charged that the government, which drew up the new draft constitution after nation-wide consultations on its contents, altered their opinions to suit its electoral interests, a charge the authorities denied.