3 the High Court or the Electoral Court has sufficient capacity to deal with the various cases brought before it, and that timeframes for each matter be limited to few days so that judgments can be delivered as soon as possible after the hearing. Challenges to managing post-election conflict As part of the body politic in Zimbabwe, it is incumbent upon me that I focus on examples from my country to articulate the challenges that any managers or would-be manager of a post-election conflict would encounter. (i) The Question of legitimacy The Zimbabwe crisis is a typical example of a post-election conflict that has been allowed to spurn over a long period of time. It is a cyclic post-election conflict that has overlapped from one postelection period into the other, thereby becoming intrinsically galvanised by the subsequent compound anger aroused by different electoral complaints. Central, however, to the challenges to resolving this conflict is the issue of legitimacy. As I have alluded to in my discussion of democracy, any conflict management process has to recognise the existence of the other party in the conflict as legitimate. The problem in Zimbabwe is that both parties to the conflict, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Zanu-PF, which in the context of Zimbabwe, represents the government, do not accept each other as legitimate political players. MDC, because of the allegations of electoral fraud it levels against the ruling party, has taken a stance that the President is illegitimate. They predicate their complaints on what they perceive as “a stolen presidential election” in March 2002. Zanu-PF, on the other hand, perceive the MDC as “a puppet” political party formed to achieve what they call “a neocolonial regime change” agenda by the country’s former colonial master, Britain. The issue of legitimacy is so central to the crisis in Zimbabwe that without processes aimed at its restoration, there is little hope the conflict can be managed. Professor Welshman Ncube, the MDC Secretary General, on 25 May 2004, in an interview with the Business Daily of South Africa, summed up the sticking points in the conflict between his party and Zanu-PF. In just three sentences in response to the