Dictators always ensure that what follows their rule will be worse. After Mugabe dies, South Africa will have anarchy and warlordism on its border

The elections in Zimbabwe were like a bad film sequel. The plot was predictable and the characters repeated what they'd said in part one, so we shuffled out of the cinema before the end. Violence makes good TV, unlike arithmetic, and the Zimbabwean government knew that the media would lose interest if the argument came down to number-crunching when the poll was over - which is why it is worth re-examining the concluding scene.

By the time Robert Mugabe was playing his bit part in the Pope's funeral, the final polling figures for the 120 contested parliamentary seats had been announced. The opposition MDC won just 41 - a loss of 16 - while Mugabe's Zanu-PF party had 78, up from its previous 63. Add on the 30 MPs that the president appoints, and Zanu-PF has an unassailable two-thirds majority.

So how did the party do it? Before the election, the opposition complained that the voters' register was inflated with as many as two million "ghost voters". The "ghosts", it seems, voted in the period between the point at which the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission announced the number of votes cast in a particular constituency, and the moment the same commission declared the result.

For example, in Manyame constituency, just outside Harare, the commission first announced that 14,812 people had voted. The MDC candidate won 8,312 votes, which should have made her the winner. But at the end of the day, the number of votes cast suddenly rocketed to 24,303. A majority of the 9,491 extra votes went to the Zanu-PF candidate (who happened to be President Mugabe's nephew). So he won, after all. A similar pattern was repeated in 29 other constituencies. The electoral commission chairman, George Chiweshe (a retired colonel), denied any rigging, saying that the initial totals given for votes cast were merely "updates from people on the ground which had not been verified". After the discrepancy was noted, it took him a week to come up with this explanation.

On election day, I watched as voters patiently queued at polling stations in the farming lands of Marondera East. The following day, it was announced that the defence minister, Sydney Sekeramayi, who won the seat by only 38 votes in the 2000 elections, had increased his majority to 9,126. Again, the number of voters shot up from the 25,193 initially announced, to 29,935. A South African election monitor told us that he had been ejected from a local polling station, and had to fight his way back in.

None the less, the South African government endorsed the election, and observers from neighbouring African countries declared it "peaceful, credible, well managed and transparent". Sources close to the South African government say Mugabe agreed to limit violence on the understanding that the election would be deemed sufficiently free and fair. The EU and the US, both relying on resident diplomats, said it was rigged - but so what? Sanctions and travel bans have angered Mugabe, but they haven't made him change his policies.

What will happen now? Nothing. The opposition's 39 legal challenges to the 2000 parliamentary results languish in court; none has been resolved. This time the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, said it would not go "the legal route", but he has not indicated any alternative, leaving the impression that he is weak and paralysed. The country is not on the verge of an uprising: most Zimbabweans I met felt powerless.

"We have become a bantustan," wrote a friend in a despairing e-mail. "South Africa panders to our leaders, and we provide them with cheap labour."

The reaction of President Thabo Mbeki provides an uneasy contrast to President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. When Togo's leader, Gnassingbe Eyadema, died at the age of 69 in February, Obasanjo acted swiftly to condemn an army-backed takeover by Eyadema's son. Sanctions were imposed, arms twisted, and within three weeks he had stood down to make way for elections.

Eventually Mugabe, who is 81, will also die. His chosen successor appears to be Joyce Mujuru, a Zanu-PF functionary whose main distinction is being married to a guerrilla leader from the struggle against white rule in the 1970s. It seems unlikely that she could retain the loyalty of the ruling party, let alone reunite the country.

Dictators always ensure that what follows their rule is worse: "Apres moi le deluge." Mbeki says - with some justification - that it is ridiculous for

the outside world to care so much about Zimbabwe and not about the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than two million have died in a decade of civil war. But after Mugabe, dissent among the Zimbabwean armed forces could turn to anarchy, and factional rivalry to warlordism. Today, it's an argument over numbers, but tomorrow Mbeki may have a much bigger problem on his border.

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News

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