By The EastAfrican

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After staging what may have been the most transparent elections in a decade and a half this past week, the situation in Zimbabwe was taking a typically African turn.

When the counting was done, incumbent and Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front candidate Emmerson Mnangagwa had won with 50.8 per cent of the vote to Nelson Chamisa’s 44.3 per cent.

When the result is as close as this in Africa, it is difficult for the losers to accept the outcome.

It did not help matters either, that it took a couple of days for the electoral commission to complete the tallying of just about five million votes.

Harare erupted almost immediately and the military moved in to quell riots by supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, who had rejected the outcome.

It was a bittersweet end to a few months of calm and hope after the dramatic events that saw former president Robert Mugabe lose his 37-year grip on Zimbabwean politics, and the intriguing assumption of the helm by Mnangagwa.

Until this week, Mnangagwa had been seen as a beacon of hope and his short tenure had a restored a certain calm and opened up the country for business. The elections were therefore supposed to be the launchpad for Zimbabwe’s long-term revival as an economically advancing democracy.

But now, with the military back on the streets where they clashed with citizens, these hopes have rapidly evaporated and with them, Mnangagwa’s credentials as a reformer.

With hindsight, one may think that after three decades of totalitarian rule, Zimbabwe needed a period of adjustment to build a new consensus around the political structures that would be used to seek a new mandate. But it was always going to be a difficult call to agree on just long this transition should be.

Mnangagwa was eager to ride on his honeymoon with the public while the opposition was anxious to see him out before he consolidated his position and made it difficult for anybody to dislodge him. An election had already been scheduled for this year anyway, so getting done with it was an overriding imperative.

As it turns out now, that view was overly optimistic because it ignored the latent mistrust a large section of the public still held for Mnangagwa and the ruling establishment that he inherited.

Whatever the case, the question for Zimbabwe now is how to pull back from the brink. Even if the past 15 years or so have made Zimbabweans resilient in the face of economic adversity, continued protests may only serve to justify a heavy clampdown. An insecure Mnangagwa may dig in and fall back to the military as his source of power.

That is hardly the outcome the protesters envisage or even desire, and Zimbabwe has not exhausted all options for resolving this impasse amicably.

The courts have not been tested and the dispute will be taken before them before long. Any suspicion that the court’s decision was arrived at under some kind of influence, however, will leave the country stuck to where it is right now.

For a binding outcome, it is imperative that all the parties create an atmosphere in which the courts can act independent of intimidation by either a riotous public or an overbearing executive.