Kuda Bhejana: Why Tendai Biti is Zanu PF’s license for rigging 2018 elections in Zimbabwe

By Kuda Bhejana

The gifts that we have, we are given by God for a reason. Our gifts are contextually given by the creator according to time and place. Whether we are endowed with special intellectual capabilities, height, courage, whatever gifts we have, it’s all for a reason.

This article is a criticism of Tendai Biti, how he has become a serious liability to the project of delivering democratic change to Zimbabwe. I am arguing why Tendai Biti’s defection from the Movement for Democratic Change was a fatal blow to MDC’s chances of getting into government which translates to the continuation of ZANU-PF’s hegemony and perpetual suffering of the people of Zimbabwe.

Soon after the MDC election loss in 2013, Tendai Biti broke ranks with the main political party in Zimbabwe which he is a founding member of and started his own new outfit. But before he founded his current “party” if it at all qualifies as such, Tendai Biti attempted a coup-de-tat on Morgan Tsvangirai where he announced that the Former Prime Minister and President of the MDC had been expelled from the party because of unconstitutional conduct among other allegations.

When Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC rebuffed Tendai Biti’s coup efforts Tendai then formed the MDC Renewal Group with his longtime friend Elton Mangoma.  The Tendai and Elton alliance did not last as much as they had hoped. The former cozy conspirators broke ranks and Tendai formed his current party, the People’s Democratic Party.

I will not get into the details of how Biti attempted to forge a coalition with Welshman Ncube’s MDC outfit. No one really understand what they were attempting to do. Was it a coalition? An alliance? A brotherhood? We do not know.

What had seemed to be an attempt by Biti to join ranks with Welshman Ncube’s MDC splinter group proved to be just a PR stunt. If this partnership had succeeded we might have given Biti and friends the benefit of the doubt, hoping at the end of it all, him and Welshman might regain their sanity and revive the real MDC of old since there would be fewer factions to join. Alas, it wasn’t going to be so.

From the outset here we already have an image of Tendai Biti showing lacking a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve once he left the Movement for Democratic Change party. And when someone has no clear vision they are motivated more by expediency than by anything else. They go with whatever is most beneficial to them at the time.

Without getting into the useless act of bashing Biti, we ought to realize that regardless of all his imperfections, it is an undisputable fact that Tendai Biti is a very important asset both to the work of dislodging of the ZANU-PF dictatorship and the reconstruction of Zimbabwe. When you look at Tendai, there is no doubt that politics is what he was born to do!

The power of any organization is in its people. People are the greatest asset of any organization you might think of and Tendai Biti was a very important figure in the MDC. He was the Secretary General, which made him the policy force of the organization. He is an undisputable intellectual, which is why the London-based digital newspaper, newzimbabwe.com relies more on his punditry on local political and economic events.

Tendai has also been invited to various fora to discuss the situation in Zimbabwe, enough acknowledgement of his political value in Zimbabwe. Having left MDC, despite having no following, Biti is still an important opposition leader.

Do you remember the time when Tendai Biti was the Secretary General of MDC? He was fierce! He was relentless! He instilled great fear into the spine of ZANU-PF.

Morgan Tsvangirai was the face of the party, the darling of the masses, the man who could take all kinds of abuses from the ZANU-PF system and still come out calm headed reassuring people that things were going to be fine. Tendai as the Secretary General was the man in charge of the strategic operations of the party. To analogize MDC to the Trump campaign, where Morgan was the Trump, Tendai was the Steve Bannon.

Even more than Bannon who is credited for steering the Trump campaign to victory by pulling strings from the behind the scene, Tendai was there interfacing with the people, being an MP.

When Tendai left the MDC we all knew that MDC would never be the same again. The fear factor was taken away from the party, because their chief strategist had left. Not only was it a sad day for the MDC, it was sad for opposition politics in Zimbabwe, a sad day for democracy.

I am by no means ignoring the reasons why Tendai left. Like any intelligent person, I believe Tendai has genuine reasons which prompted him to make the decisions that he made. But, we don’t just make decisions for the sake of making decisions, do we?

Sometime our decisions are mistakes. That’s the reason why mistake is a word in the first place. Mistake is a word, because sometime our decisions are erroneous. We fail where we thought we could succeed. Tendai’s departure from MDC was a mistake!

It soon became apparent that Tendai Biti was not a man of the people like he thought he was. People love Tendai. But, people love Tendai as part of the Movement for Democratic Change. Right now Tendai Biti is playing the ego card.

He is a man who understands his value and is transacting it very very well, to his own benefit and to the suffering of Zimbabwe. The truth is that Zimbabwe needs Biti, and Biti might not need Zimbabwe!

However, Biti is needed only if he can join a well-established organization which was established to fight for the liberation of the people of Zimbabwe and the prosperity the nation.

If Tendai swallows his pride and re-join MDC, there would be mass celebrations in Zimbabwe. Zanu-PF would panic and it won’t be politics as usual anymore! That’s how powerful Tendai Biti is as a brand!

Numbers game and Coalition

Tendai’s return to MDC is what’s needed, not a coalition. A coalition is too experimental, the same way it is a loose and uneasy arrangement. A coalition is Zanu-PF’s ticket to 2018 Election victory because it is an acknowledgement, an erroneous one by MDC that all this while they have failed to defeat Zanu-PF because of lack of enough votes.

According to the coalition philosophy, electoral fraud is not the problem, but lack of enough support, which uniting various parties can solve. The Opposition coalition project, whether achieved or not, is going to be ZANU-PF’s justification for winning the next elections after they rig them.

They will either say, the opposition failed to unite to boost their numbers and we had more votes as usual. Or they will say, the coalition is weak and a sign of confusion in the opposition camp. We did not have a coalition, we are a united brand and people voted for us because of our unity and policy clarity. This will be Jonathan Moyo’s role in the few weeks after 2018 victory; spinning this falsehood which has been fed fat by coalition talk.

The fact that Morgan has retained the loyalty of masses of Zimbabweans even after his perennial defeats to Robert Mugabe at the polls is not because people are foolish. People are pragmatic.

It was Tendai’s headache to figure out that if Zanu-PF was stealing votes, how could MDC claim the power that Zimbabweans were clearly giving them? That’s what a Secretary General is responsible for!

Yes, Morgan might have made some mistakes, both as a leader, a person and a public figure, but people know that none of us is perfect. People also know history and on that, they know how far Morgan has come, all the losses that he has accrued at the hands of ZANU-PF – including the loss of his own wife in an assassination attempt. People also know that the elections are being rigged!

Ever-since Biti formed his own party, he has failed to acquire the needed support because people think of his efforts as abortive. People feel that as long as the opposition change project remains, they would rather mend what’s already there than support Tendai’s fresh and equally unexplained vision.

As it is, Tendai Biti has become the biggest factor to opposition weakness in Zimbabwe.

If you think of it, there has never been much need for an opposition coalition in Zimbabwean politics than when Tendai Biti left the MDC.

People always knew that MDC has the numbers. And election results, albeit rigged bear testimony to this.

The question in Zimbabwean politics has never been how to win elections! MDC has been winning elections ever since they were formed. The question is how to make ZANU-PF relinquish power when they lose the polls. Another equally important question is how MDC can claim power when they win elections, because they always win elections! This is the responsbility that Tendai Biti ran away from in the MDC.

It is no surprise why there has been reluctance from the MDC to form a coalition of opposition parties. They know they always win elections number-wise. If you are obsessed so much with opposition coalition, this article has been an attempt to provoke your imagination a little bit. What would happen if Tendai Biti rejoined MDC?

You can visit Kuda Bhejana’s blog KudaBhejana.com