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Elections to be held in March not in June: Mugabe

HARARE: Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections are still scheduled for March and will not be postponed to June as a government minister intimated last month, President Robert Mugabe told state media on Tuesday night.

"Elections will be held in March. We have not as government made a decision to postpone elections," the official Herald newspaper quoted Mugabe as saying.

In remarks carried on state radio and television last December, Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa said the elections had been moved to June so that they could be conducted under a new constitution and to give time for a new voter registration exercise.

On Tuesday Mugabe said elections would be postponed only if absolutely necessary, at the latest to the first week of April.

Zimbabwe expects to hold a referendum next month on a draft constitution produced by a 400-member government-appointed commission, which critics have rejected as leaving Mugabe's sweeping powers intact, among other concerns.

The southern African country will this month overhaul its voters' roll, after a United Nations Electoral Mission recently condemned it as flawed, with a quarter of the registered voters now dead and an estimated two million having changed their constituencies.

Analysts say Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party, in power since the former British colony gained independence in 1980, faces its stiffest challenge yet in the general elections from the labour-backed Movement for Democratic Change, seen feeding on the country's worst economic crisis in two decades which many blame on government mismanagement.-Reuters