Trump’s rigged election comments a ‘gift to dictators,’ say Africans
Source: Reuters
If Donald Trump is interested in rigged elections, Zimbabwean opposition leader Tendai Biti says he could teach him a thing or two. Biti was arrested for treason and detained for a month after daring to suggest his party had defeated President Robert Mugabe in a vote in 2008.
“They denied me food. They beat me up. They put me in leg irons. They beat me in the private parts,” Biti, a lawyer who later served as finance minister in an eventual unity government, told Reuters. “That’s real election rigging.”
To opposition figures in Africa, and in other parts of the world that lack the 240-year U.S. history of peaceful transitions of power, Trump’s assertion that November’s U.S. presidential election will be “rigged”, and his declaration that he may not accept the outcome, are dangerous words.
“Donald Trump is a gift to all tin-pot dictators on the African continent. He is giving currency and legitimacy to rigging because if it can exist in America, it can exist anywhere,” Biti said. “He has no idea what he’s talking about, absolutely no idea,” said Biti, who speaks from the experience of three election defeats to Mugabe, a 92-year-old ex-guerrilla who has run Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. “It makes us cross because in Africa there’s real election rigging.”
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Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/trumps-rigged-election-comments-a-gift-to-dictators-say-africans/
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