Four weeks of post-election stalemate could end in Zimbabwe today if a recount of votes in the presidential elections is completed, electoral officials said.

George Chiweshe, chairman of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), said: “We trust that by Monday, April 28 this process will have been concluded... leading to the announcement of the result of the presidential election.

"But I can’t say exactly when the results will be coming,” he added.

It is now a month since the country's presidential election saw Robert Mugabe face off against Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change.

Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party has already conceded it lost control of the country’s parliament for the first time since taking power after independence from Britain in 1980. A recount of the March 29 vote in 18 out of 23 constituencies showed no change in previous results, giving a historic victory to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), officials said.

The ZEC now plans to invite Mr Mugabe and Mr Tsvangirai to a final “verification and collation exercise”, where they will compare their own vote tallies with the ZEC’s own, according to the Sunday Mail, a state-run national newspaper and government mouthpiece.

The candidates were likely to dispute the figures, which would further delay the announcement of results by up to a week, according to Utoile Silaigwana, the ZEC deputy chief elections officer.

Analysts agreed that the presidential election results would be published later this week, but said that the recount was a delaying tactic aimed at securing victory for Mugabe through a campaign of violence.

“They have delayed them for too long, and, given the pressure from the international community, there is no doubt they will be announced this week,” said Lovemore Madhuku, a political analyst.

“It is very likely that they will announce that Mugabe did not get a 50 per cent majority, but will show him ahead of Tsvangirai,” Mr Madhuku said.

Takura Zhangazha, a political commentator in Harare, said: “In the event of a run-off, the strategy is to ensure that there is limited access to some rural areas through violence” by Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party.

The opposition maintains that Mr Tsvangirai beat 84-year-old Mr Mugabe. But Zimbabwe’s main independent election monitoring body said Mr Tsvangirai had won but failed to get more than the 50 per cent majority needed to avoid a run-off.

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