HARARE – THE MDC Alliance has trained and deployed 44,000 election agents, the party’s leader Nelson Chamisa said on Thursday.

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) says voting will take place across 11,000 polling stations on election day on Monday.

Fearful of rigging by the ZEC and Zanu PF, the MDC is deploying an average of three agents per polling station.

Chamisa made the disclosure at the end of a six-rally marathon which culminated with a rally before a huge crowd at Chibuku Stadium in Chitungwiza.

The 40-year-old, shown to be neck and neck with incumbent, President Emmerson Mnanngagwa in credible opinion polls, said they were prepared to “overwhelm” any rigging edifice by getting all their supporters to go out and vote.

He said Zanu PF had used rigging in the past to “get this far, and no further.”

Th MDC is “bigger than it was in 1999 and greater than it was in 2013,” he told thousands of cheering supporters.

“We want our country to be where Herbert Chitepo, Josiah Tongogara and Lookout Masuku wanted it to be: great and prosperous,” said Chamisa, revving up for the campaign’s biggest rally to be held at Freedom Square in Harare on Saturday.

Chamisa predicted his party would win outright in the first round, and encouraged supporters to return to their polling stations when polls close at 7PM on Monday to “defend your vote.”

“There’s a runover, not a runoff,” he confidently predicted.

He railed against accusations from Zanu PF that his party was spoiling for a violent confrontation, telling supporters: “We want peace in this country. In fact we are the most peaceful people, having survived 18 years of provocation from Zanu PF.”

He said “citizens are the ones who define peace”, warning that if the MDC Alliance had a sense of being cheated when results are announced, the country would be ungovernable.

Mnangagwa would not be able to rule the country when citizens felt cheated because “confidence in the economy comes from stability, and stability comes from the people.”