“WHEN you join in a political fight by way of an election you must be prepared to lose,” President Robert Mugabe told a rally in Nyanga, just three days before the March 29 polls.

Getting fewer votes than your opponent clearly does not constitute losing in the lexicon of the Zimbabwean leader, who has stubbornly stayed in power for 28 years. Instead, it means people have “voted incorrectly” and must be taught otherwise by the usual methods of violence and withholding food. The lists of results published at polling stations to make the vote more transparent have proved useful for identifying the areas most in need of such voter education.

The 84-year-old president’s refusal to step down following elections in which even his own party admits that his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai received more votes, should not have come as a surprise.

The first time the people of Zimbabwe stood up to Mugabe was in the referendum of February 2000, when they overwhelmingly voted to reject his new constitution. I was in the country at the time and was caught up in the excitement of people asserting themselves against their leader. Mugabe appeared on state TV to concede defeat, declaring: “Government accepts the results and respects the will of the people.”

He looked old and tired, and as this was only my third visit to the country, I confidently predicted his demise. “No, this is very bad,” said a Zimbabwean friend who, like many, had once been a great supporter of the liberation leader. “You will see.”

Within weeks, the retaliation had started. It began with the farm invasions, for white farmers had funded the newly formed opposition. Across the country, “youth training camps” sprang up for the so-called Green Bombers who used violence and rape to spread terror throughout the countryside.

Violence was nothing new for Mugabe, who famously once declared: “I have degrees in violence.” As many as 20,000 people are believed to have been massacred in the 1980s in his campaign against the people of Matabele-land who had supported Joshua Nkomo, his rival in the independence movement. What was new in 2000 was the international criticism – until the mid 1990s Mugabe was still receiving honorary degrees from around the world and in 1994 was awarded an honorary knighthood.

Elections for parliament in 2000 and 2005, and for president in 2002, were marked by further violence and intimidation. On each occasion, an atmosphere of hope was followed by a sense of anticlimax when results were rigged and nothing changed.

In 2005 it was the cities that had voted most heavily against him and he soon retaliated again. Operation Murambats-vina, a so-called “urban beautification programme”, meant sending bulldozers to demolish vast townships in Harare and elsewhere, destroying the homes of more than 700,000 people.

Last month’s elections were the most peaceful of the last decade. The unexpected freedom of the opposition to campaign led many to believe Mugabe’s own security forces were refusing to do his bidding.

I was surprised, then, when, after a day of following Tsvangirai to rallies in Mugabe’s heart-land, I went to see the opposition leader and found him downcast.

“I feel I may go into the Guinness Book of Records for winning the most elections and never getting power,” he said. “Suddenly you find you’re 60 and you’re still at it. Of course you think, what’s the point?”

For the Zimbabwean president, there is more than just political power at stake. “You cannot underestimate the Charles Taylor effect,” said a former confidant of Mugabe, referring to the Liberian warlord turned president who accepted exile in Nigeria, only to find himself being tried in the International Criminal Court, accused of war crimes. “He is terrified of ending up in the Hague, as, by the way, are many of those around him.”

Even if Mugabe decided he had had enough, he would have to face the fact that he has become a hostage of his own system. Over the years, he has cleverly woven a web of patronage. Party officials, senior military and police, high court judges and even bishops have been kept on side with handouts of farms and access to perks such as cheap fuel and an official exchange rate that enables them to buy foreign currency for a hundredth of the market rate.

This has created a mafia of several thousand people, many of whom have blood on their hands. Should any contemplate switching sides, meticulous records kept on file in a special archive in the Reserve Bank could be used against them.

Key figures who see their survival at stake include Constantine Chiwenga, the army chief, Augustine Chihuri, the police commissioner, Henry Muchena, an air vice-marshal, a number of former military commanders, Gideon Gono, the powerful governor of the Reserve Bank, and long-time politburo members such as Didymus Mutasa.

Although Tsvangirai says he has promised Mugabe “an honourable exit”, he cannot give guarantees to all these others. “No matter what Tsvangirai says about guaranteeing President Mugabe’s safety, we cannot trust the man,” said a member of Zanu-PF. “If one day he gets a call from Gordon Brown or George Bush and is told to arrest Mugabe, do you think he won’t do that?”

The military hierarchy is particularly worried. A leaked memo reported Muchena, the air vice-marshal, as stating that Zanu-PF “did not fight a liberation war to have Zimbabweans vote incorrectly. The military has now taken over the organisation of the campaign and five senior military officers have been assigned to each constituency to ensure that in the next round the people vote correctly”.

For his part, Tsvangirai has resisted pressure from younger members of his party to call a mass uprising. He told me last month: “If I’d put people on the streets last time, they would have been mauled to pieces. I don’t want to be responsible for this.”

Tsvangirai’s main hope is international pressure. Brown has stepped up his criticism of events in Zimbabwe, and African leaders who gathered in Zambia yesterday want to break the deadlock. However, even if fellow African leaders finally stand up to Mugabe, it is unclear what they can achieve.

The leader best placed to apply pressure is Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, but he has long shown reluctance to act against the veteran leader and has no love for Tsvangirai, making clear that he would prefer Zimbabwe’s ruling party to find a replacement for Mugabe.

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