By Cris Chinaka
HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe onFriday registered as a candidate in the March 29 elections,facing a challenge from a former ally who has vowed to make thecrumbling economy the focus of the campaign.
Mugabe is seeking another five-year term to extend his28-year rule of the once-prosperous southern African country.
Rivals say his re-election would be a disaster forZimbabweans who are suffering amid an economic meltdown,highlighted on Thursday when Zimbabwe said annualised inflationtopped 66,000 percent in December -- a new record.
Millions of Zimbabweans are expected to vote in thepresidential, parliamentary and municipal polls. Mugabe and hisopponents have described the event as a landmark election inthe country's post-independence period.
"We're very confident of victory, 99.9 percent confident,"Emerson Mnangagwa, a cabinet minister and official with theruling ZANU-PF party, told reporters after presenting Mugabe'selection registration papers to a court in Harare.
The opposition is concerned the elections will not be free.Mugabe has been widely accused of rigging the last three majorelections and of using security forces to quell dissent.
Earlier this week Mugabe, who turns 84 next week, toldstate media that he was "raring to go" into the election.
But Mugabe, who was described as a "discredited dictator"on Thursday by U.S. President George W. Bush, must contend withSimba Makoni, a renegade former finance minister who is runningfor president as an independent.
The ZANU-PF expelled Makoni, 58, earlier this week after heannounced what many observers consider the most seriouschallenge to the veteran Zimbabwean leader, who has been inpower since independence from Britain in 1980.
Makoni, accompanied by his wife, filed his registrationpapers at the court in Harare on Friday.
Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the main faction of theMovement for Democratic Change, the country's largestopposition party, also filed on Friday to contest thepresidential election, although he did not do so in person.
The leader of a smaller faction of the MDC has pulled outof the race and is expected to back Makoni.
Makoni's entry could split the opposition vote and spurMugabe's re-election in spite of the nation's economic misery.
Critics say government mismanagement has plunged thecountry into a crisis that is marked by soaring poverty,widespread malnutrition and chronic food and fuel shortages.
Mugabe says the problems are the result of sabotage byWestern powers who are opposed to his policy of seizingwhite-owned farms and redistributing the land to blacks.
Despite accusations of widespread human rights violations,Mugabe is regarded in much of Africa as an anti-colonialchampion and hero of the liberation era of the 1960s and 1970s.
(Editing by Paul Simao and Caroline Drees)