Supporters cheer Mugabe as he arrives to launch his ruling ZANU-PF party’s election manifesto in Harare yesterday. In a 90-minute speech, Mugabe (inset) spoke of a battle for survival.

Reuters/AFP/Harare

Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe launched a “fight of our life” campaign yesterday to extend his three-decade grip on power in a July 31 election already being criticised as poorly planned, underfunded and plagued with irregularities.

Speaking to tens of thousands of supporters in a sports ground in Harare’s Highfield township, the 89-year-old said his ZANU-PF party wanted to stay in office to push through its plans to increase black ownership of the economy.

Critics accuse Mugabe, who led the former Rhodesia to independence from Britain in 1980, of ruining one of Africa’s most promising economies by seizing white-owned farms and giving them to landless blacks with no farming experience.

“This is the fight of our lives. This is a battle for survival,” Mugabe told the crowd, adding that ZANU-PF had reorganised and strengthened itself for a “devastating victory” after nearly losing power five years ago.

“Those who work with our enemies, our former colonisers the British, never again shall we allow them to taste leadership of the state,” he said.

Mugabe issued a feisty rallying call to some 20,000 supporters, as he endeavours to extend his 33-year rule.

“You are our soldiers. You have a battle to fight. Go into the battle well-armed. Go into the battle with the full knowledge that there is a political enemy. This is a do or die struggle.”

Although there have been no formal opinion polls, surveys in the past year by Freedom House, a US political think tank, and African research group Afro-Barometer have given Mugabe a narrow lead over his main rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

The campaign launch comes a day after the Constitutional Court rejected appeals, including from Tsvangirai, to delay the vote in order to allow more time for reform of the security forces and state media.

The legal argument over the election date has raised fears of another disputed poll, although with just three weeks to go, there are few expectations of the kind of violence and bloodshed that marred the 2008 elections, after which Mugabe and Tsvangirai were forced into a power-sharing government.

Instead, Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) says the biggest threat is ZANU-PF “software rigging” – tampering with the voters roll, or making it hard for MDC supporters to register to vote.

ZANU-PF have denied the allegations.

The MDC also alleges that some members of the army have been deployed in the countryside to intimidate potential opponents – a charge the security forces also deny.

Mugabe’s party lost its parliamentary majority to Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s party at the last elections for the first time since independence in 1980,

Tsvangirai won the most ballots in the first round of the 2008 vote, but pulled out of the second round amid violence against his supporters.

Some 200 opposition activists were killed around those polls.

Amid the backdrop of violence the international community pressed Mugabe into a power sharing government with Tsvangirai.

The elections will choose a successor to their four-year old administration.

Under a new constitution Mugabe could serve another two five-year terms, or until he is 99 years old.

“We want to succeed. We need a political life,” he said at a rally held at Zimbabwe Grounds, in the capital’s Highfield township where he gave his first speech emerging from seven years of a guerrilla warfare against white minority rule in 1979.

In a 90-minute address yesterday, Mugabe urged ZANU-PF to avoid any violence, saying it was set to win cleanly: “Let’s kick our opponents with votes. But please no violence. Let’s have an election without violence, without intimidation.”

He also mocked Tsvangirai with references to recent sex scandals and attacked the 15-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC) for trying to get Harare to delay the poll, saying it amounted to interfering with Zimbabwe’s top court.

“Let it be known that we are in SADC voluntarily. If SADC chooses to do stupid and idiotic things we can pull out,” he said.

The regional bloc has pressed Mugabe to roll back his decision to hold elections on July 31, in order to allow time for a series of reforms that would limit the military’s role in politics and strip ghost voters from the electoral roll.

Mugabe singled out South African President Jacob Zuma’s top Zimbabwe adviser, Lindiwe Zulu, for particular criticism, saying that she was behaving as if she were his country’s prefect by saying Harare should postpone the vote by at least a month.

“Did such a person think that we as a country would take heed of this streetwoman’s stupid utterances,” said Mugabe, without mentioning Zulu by name.