Who cares if the MDC splits into a thousand factions?
By Wilbert Mukori
It is rutting seasons in the wildebeest MDC camp, sex is in the air and the bulls are reeking of their own urine saturated with pheromones. They are bellowing and snorting with malice, aggression and intent; they are itching for a fight. There is going to be a fight; horns will lock, tufts of fur will fly and blood will flow.
At least with the wildebeest the fighting will culminate in mating and a new generation conceived and the herd will settle down and move on.
With the MDC the fight is totally pointless for the problem of poor leadership which is always the underlining problem behind the split has never resulted in any of the new factions getting competent leaders.
So the party, united, had poor leaders and after it has splinted it will still have the same problem of poor leadership. The reason this is so is of course obvious; you cannot create the quality that was not there in the first place regardless what you do.
The likes of Mangoma and Biti cannot accuse Tsvangirai of being incompetent when they have been part of the same team that has led the party from one blunder to the next. The two were MDC’s chief negotiators in the GPA and of all people they should have understood the importance of the democratic reforms and seen to it that they were implemented.
They did not and there is no evidence to show that Tsvangirai stopped them!
Indeed many people are not concerned about whether the split of the MDC will result is a better led MDC party or parties. It is the split itself that they are concerned about; the issue of poor leadership has not even registered.
There are many people whose blood pressure shot up when the MDC split up in 2005 and has never come down to normal. Instead of the usual healthy 120/80 millimetres of mercury systolic pressure over diastolic pressure it shot up to Usain Bolt’s at the end of the 100m sprint. It is ok for the blood pressure to go up after physical exercise but not after a mental exercise – stress.
The trouble with BP is once you have the ailment there is no going back, you are on BP medication for life!
The pending split in MDC-T will send the BP of those who found the 2005 split stressful back up to Olympic athlete levels again. And, no doubt, there will be a new wave of politically stressed BP sufferers to join them.
What I find interesting is none of these stressed and hyperventilating people will give you a convincing reason why the split of the MDC matters other than that it divides and weakens the opposition. In other words quality counts for nothing it is quantity that matters.
MDC have the numbers on their side and in 2008 too but because they did not have the quality Mugabe was able to cheat them out of victory with ease each time. The tyrant will do the same again at the next election given the same mediocre opposition!
The MDC’s greatest weakness is that they act – they have no time for such niceties as thinking before you act, they act – like a herd of wildebeest. They will blunder from one disaster to the next without ever pausing to ask what went wrong.
MDC, the Movement for Democratic Change, is a movement alright but as for the last bit – democratic change – not even Tsvangirai much less the party’s grass root membership know what that means, even today, fifteen years since the party was formed.
When the GPA was signed in 2009 the GNU was tasked to implement a raft of democratic reforms and draft a new DEMOCRATIC constitution designed to dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship and bring the democratic change, the party name espouse.
The MDC had the majority in the GNU parliament and cabinet, had SADC and the whole international community’s to support in ensuring the tyrant Mugabe accepted the reforms and had five years to make sure the reforms were implemented.
When Tsvangirai was sworn in as Prime Minister of the Republic of Zimbabwe in February 2009, you could see this was the proudest moment of his life. He was a man on a mission and he did hit the ground running. No sooner was the swearing ceremony over he had his head down the movement, the wildebeest herd two million strong, was on the move straight into his first blunder.
Tsvangirai toured Europe and North America swearing Mugabe had changed and the West should fund the country’s economic recovery.
Of course Mugabe had not changed; indeed the tyrant continued with his violent seizures of white owned farms just to underline he was running the show and it was business as usual – the Zanu PF corrupt and lawless way! That did nothing to force Tsvangirai to think again, he ploughed on heedlessly committing one blunder after another.
MDC had five years to implement the reforms, not even one reform was implemented. Once again, instead of pausing to see why the party had made this blunder the herd put its collective head down straight into yet another blunder.
MDC accepted the rubbish Copac constitution. Tsvangirai even claimed the document was “a child of the MDC” and assured the rest of the herd, three million strong judging from the result of the yes vote in the referendum that followed, that the new constitution would deliver free and fair elections.
It was Mugabe who “dictated the Copac constitution” as the Zanu PF MP on the drafting committee, Paul Mangwana, boasted. The weak and feeble constitution allowed Mugabe to keep total control of every state institution and thus was able to blatantly rig the elections. The rest is history.
After the rigged election one thought that surely the MDC herd will finally stop and ask what happened to the promise of free and fair elections? Wrong, not this herd; it is on the move, it is a movement after all and that means it must keep moving. It is rutting season; the bulls are strutting drunk with testosterone, turfs of hair are flying and blood is flowing, the fighting is in full swing!
“Morgan is not learned and he never has a plan B, kungokiya kiya as he goes along…., “commented Mhukahuru in New Zimbabwean.
Plan B; what plan B, Mhukahuru? Tsvangirai has no plan A. Who has ever heard of a plan anything in kiya kiya, you just muddle along. He is a confused man without a plan, a plan would only add to his confusion. Besides, he has no time to waste on such niceties as think! He has never produced any plan and the herd has always agreed with the imaginary plan, everyone is happy!
There were beautiful pictures of MDC supporters outside Harvest House, a thousand strong sing and dance in support of the dear leader Morgan Tsvangirai after the rebels said they had suspended him the day before. Back in 2004 the then US Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Chris Dell said in a leaked cable that Tsvangirai was a “flawed and indecisive character”.
God knows the MDC leader has proven the Ambassador right a thousand times since then. But looking into those faces in the photograph, a sea of red shirts and baseball caps and blank faces one thing was clear – Tsvangirai can blunder and prove Ambassador Dell right a million times and a million times again, the wildebeest herd in their red regalia and blank faces will never ever see it.
All those people wittering endless about uniting the opposition are no better than the wildebeest herd outside Harvest House. They are obsessed about quantity the blundering from pillar to post does not matter, what matters is to keep the herd together.
Surely it would be better to be the more savvy Zebra travelling as a small family group, sensible enough to turn back if they should find a flooded river barring their way and not blunder in heedless of the danger like the wildebeest. It will take hundreds of thousands of dead wildebeest before the herd finally realise it is better to wait a day or two for the flood to pass, it always does, before making the crossing.
I am a black Zimbabwean and I too took great offence when the white supremacists said blacks are incapable of self-government. Well 34 years of Mugabe’s corrupt and tyrannical rule has left those white supremacists saying “I told you so!”
After giving our political support to a tyrant for decades you would think the nation had learnt the lesson. Sadly that was not so, for the last fifteen years we had switched our blind allegiance from a tyrant to a blundering and indecisive leader.
Of course Zimbabwe is in this hell-on-earth because of our wildebeest mentality of acting without ever stopping to think through. Worse still, this nation is not going to get out of this hell-hole as long as we keeping blundering from pillar to post without ever learning from our past mistakes.
By failing to implement the critically important democratic reforms because of their breath-taking incompetence; Morgan Tsvangirai, Tendai Biti and the rest of the MDC leaders have betrayed the nation’s cause of ending the Mugabe dictatorship and bringing democratic change. They are therefore not to be trusted with the responsibility of leading this great nation ever again. Who cares if they now splinter into a thousand and one political factions?
