Tsvangirai performing well in interviews

By Diana Mitchell

TELEGENIC, ARTICULATE BUT NOT WHOLLY UNDERSTOOD

That Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is currently Zimbabwe’s best hope for an end to its glaring problems is not generally doubted. What is still in the realms of wishful thinking is that the ordinary folk should experience the extraordinary turnaround that Morgan himself has recently experienced. From political pariah, target for murder, traitor, and police punchball this brave leader is now embraced by none other than the author of all his sufferings. It almost beggars belief.

So it is with intense interest that those of us Zimbabweans involuntarily exiled in Britain are watching, listening and praying – if so inclined – for his success. Today he performed well for watchers in Britain on the Andrew Marr show which is almost as good an annointing of an emergent national leader as you can get.

He has been given wide exposure in Europe and America: shaking the hands of world leaders of the stature of Angela Merkel and Barak Obama for instance. Its a great change from the ancient tyrant, Mugabe’s indiscriminate embrace of everything non-Western.

When he smiles and his rotund, faintly scarred face lights up, he looks every bit the charismatic, friendly yet serious person I first met when continuing in my Whos Who, political-pundit-mode back in 1998. It was then that I asked Trevor Ncube, editor of The Independent newspaper at that time, if he would publish an interview I wanted to do to promote Morgan for his paper’s readers. My subject’s brisk, intelligent delivery of answers to pressing questions of the day hasn’t changed either.

He certainly looks confident. Every inch the leader. My concern is that he has got his time cut out trying to make Mugabe look respectable. His sincerity in believing that this is the only route to delivery from the evil wrought by that man and his cronies, is not in doubt.

My only concern is the disjuncture of `then and now’ for the people he hopes to rule. He waves away Marr’s valid questioning the continuing grabbing of the last remaining farms (he knows as we all do that this is the only way through to the stony heart of his new partner) and of the continued infringements on the freedoms, – never mind the human rights – of those Zimbabweans perceived to oppose the ruling party.

In essence, these, his MDC followers are the people who have so joyously elevated Morgan Tsvangirai to his present high position. Beatings, rapings, stealing farms? “That was then and this is now” is not a reassuring approach.

I don’t know how he could do better but I do know that the begging bowl will fill more rapidly when we see indisputable evidence that the security of persons and property has been convincingly and irreversibly restored to that great country.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell