African press review 2 August 2013

Africa’s newspapers react to the tense situation in Zimbabwe after claims of landslide victory by President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party in the 31 July election.And Ugandan Catholic women are worried about  "anyhow husbands".

“The people have spoken,” crows Zimbabwe's state-owned Herald newspaper in a trumpet-sounding front page headline. According to the paper, Mugabe and his Zanu-PF are

poised to sweep to power

with a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly.

Newsday reports that its teams noticed thousands of would-be voters being turned away at several polling stations around the country after their names were inexplicably not found in contentious voters’ roll.

ZimEye also accuses Zanu-PF of bussing thousands of fake voters from rural locations to vote for it in various polling stations across the country.

Bulawayo 24 is shocked that, despite the documentation of the "sham" by foreign diplomats and independent Zimbabwean election observers, the African Union and the regional grouping Sadc still called the vote peaceful, orderly, free and fair. For the paper, the two organisations are just an empty calabash dumped in Zimbabwe.

“It’s not over yet," headlines ZimDaily.com, borrowing a line from Morgan Tsvangirai “the man who has been standing for us all”.

ChangeZimbabwe.com quotes opposition lawmaker Roy Bennett  as saying that up to 40 per cent of Zimbabwe’s potential electorate was disenfranchised from the vote, due to manipulation by the Zanu-PF machinery.

Kenya’s Standard Digital newspaper says up to one million people were prevented from voting, citing a report by the Zimbabwe Elections Support Network, the largest group of observers.

The Daily Nation observes that the 89-year-old Mugabe, Africa’s oldest leader, is seeking a seventh term of office and has threatened to arrest his challenger Morgan Tsvangirai if he tries to declare an early victory.

In South Africa the Mail and Guardian ridicules the Zimbabwe Herald's claimthat the paper was masterminding a Google-backed plot to manipulate the results of the vote, poison the environment in Zimbabwe and hatch Arab-style revolts in the country.

In Nigeria the Catholic Women’s Council raises an alarm that the country could run out of quality husbands by 2023 if emergency measures are not taken to keep grooming them.

The body’s leader, Chief Felicia Onyeaba, was speaking to Punch newspaper ahead of the inauguration of new Catholic all-boys’ college in Abuja this Friday.

Onyeaba warns that Nigeria could run out of quality husbands in just 10 years, leaving highly educated women wishing to get married with no choice but settle for what she describes as “anyhow husbands”.