PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe, who has kept Zimbabwe under a brutal dictatorship for three decades, appears to have lost power in a shocking electoral rebuff in which the opposition Movement for Democratic Change claims to have won the presidency with more than 50 percent of the vote. The state Electoral Commission confirmed that Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party failed to win the majority in parliament, the House of Assembly, for the first time in 28 years.

Zimbabwe teetered on the brink of crisis and held its breath as the commission withheld the official results of last weekend’s presidential election for five days in the wake of widely believed unofficial reports that Mugabe had lost decisively to opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. The tensions were heightened by the fact that Mugabe had disappeared from public view since last Saturday, amid reports that negotiations were under way between him and opposition leaders for a “dignified” way out for him and a deal to shield him from prosecution if he stepped down. Other reports circulated in Harare, the capital, that the withholding of the presidential poll results by the Electoral Commission was part of Mugabe’s game plan to buy time to allow him to rig the outcome.

The circumstances surrounding Mugabe’s apparent dramatic loss of power have close parallels with the fall from power of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. The results of the snap election, which showed the massive rejection of the Marcos regime, were tampered with by the Marcos-controlled Commission on Elections. The tampering triggered a military rebellion and the subsequent people power revolution that swept him out of office.

The unrest in Zimbabwe over the withheld presidential poll results has not yet reached the combustion point of a people power uprising. But Zimbabwe’s people, brutalized by Mugabe’s ruthless dictatorship, are coming close to it as results collected by party poll watchers point to a massive electoral loss for the ruling party. They are ill-disposed to accept any manipulated results from the Electoral Commission.

The lesson stares us in the face, as it now confronts Zimbabwe, that manipulated election results are catalysts of political explosions that are devastating even to entrenched dictatorships, like Mugabe’s and Marcos’. As recently as four years ago, in the 2004 election, attempts to tamper with the results, through presidential interference in the count in the Commission on Elections, planted a festering time bomb that has fueled a series of political crises for the incumbent administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Results released by Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission showed that the MDC and its allies won 109 seats as against 97 for Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in the 210-member lower house. Frustrated with the “deafening silence” of the commission on the presidential results, the MDC preemptively claimed that Tsvangirai, had won an outright victory, with 50.3 percent of the votes, with Mugabe taking just 43.8 percent. The opposition based its claim on its tabulation of results posted outside polling stations nationwide. It then called on Mugabe to step down to ensure an orderly transfer of power.

The opposition preempted the announcement, despite a warning by Mugabe’s aides that publication of the results could be punished for preempting the Electoral Commission. They said publication would be regarded as an attempted coup.

A resignation by Mugabe and his engagement in negotiations with the opposition over a dignified exit would be humiliating for him in view of the fact that he had vowed never to allow Tsvangirai to rule during his lifetime.

Hailed as the father of his country (formerly known as Rhodesia, under British rule), Mugabe, a former Marxist, led the campaign for independence of Zimbabwe in 1980 under black majority rule. As president, he has ruled with an iron hand, and drove the once relatively prosperous country to economic collapse.

In the 1980s, Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade slaughtered 20,000 Nbedele civilians in Matabeleland. Widely blamed for the economy’s collapse, Mugabe faced rising discontent over the world’s highest inflation rate of more than 100,000 percent, a worthless currency, severe food and fuel shortages, and an unemployment rate of 80 percent. His opponents have accused him of rigging the presidential election in 2002, when two of his opponents, including the opposition leader Tsvangirai, were beaten up by Mugabe’s thugs.

As a catalyst of events leading to the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, the tampering with results of the February 1986 snap election proved to be the spark of his demise. The count being done by the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections showed Corazon Aquino leading Marcos more than halfway through the tally, until the Commission on Elections produced results drastically reversing the outcome. Computer operators tabulating the results then walked out to protest against the rigging.

The alteration of the results, which was confirmed by the Marcos-controlled National Assembly, was too much for the population to take. It sparked a massive civil disobedience movement led by Ms Aquino. US President Ronald Reagan dispatched his special envoy, Philip Habib, to defuse the dangerously escalating stalemate by proposing a power-sharing arrangement between Ms Aquino and Marcos. She rejected the formula, insisting Marcos had stolen the election. Realizing the crisis had hit a dead end, Habib flew back to Washington. But before he arrived in the US capital, the military mutiny at Camp Aguinaldo broke out on Feb. 22, 1986.

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