Tsvangirai is our best foot forward

By Luke Tamborinyoka

There is a sponsored cacophony that is rising against the tide of the true national sentiment – it is the paid noise that is saying Morgan Tsvangirai must go.

There is a difference between the genuine feeling of the MDC national membership and the voice and sentiment being sponsored by the people’s enemies in our midst.

The people of this country are aware of what Morgan Tsvangirai has done and continues to do for the democratic struggle in Zimbabwe. They are also aware that he still has the fire in his belly; the energy to continue with the agenda for a new Zimbabwe.

He has been so good and popular that Robert Mugabe and his party have had to hire an Israeli Consultancy firm to steal the people’s victory. Zanu PF’s own puny powers, without a hired hand, could not match him.

That is why it is difficult, to this date, to find the millions who voted for Mugabe; all one sees across the country are an aggrieved people from whom a future has been stolen.

Since the grand theft of July 31, there have been two national council meetings of the MDC, with the third one taking place today (Friday) in Harare. The national council is the MDC’s supreme decision-making body outside Congress, which Congress overwhelmingly elected Tsvangirai in 2011 for a five year term that ends in 2016.After those two meetings, the national council has twice reaffirmed its support for Morgan Tsvangirai as the leader of the people’s party.

At the two national council meetings, President Tsvangirai has openly told this august body that notwithstanding his term that he is currently serving, party members are free to discuss and debate the issue of leadership renewal.

He is a true democrat who has told his party that the issue of leadership renewal is not as sacred and sacrosanct as it is in other parties where leaders serve for as long a time as the age of Nelson Chamisa!

The reaffirmation by the national council has shown that the organs of the party still have faith in his leadership.

Now, the worrying development is that the debate is no longer taking place in the MDC. It is now taking place in Zanu PF where a fund has been created to destabilise and decimate the MDC; to decimate the character and person of Morgan Tsvangirai.

It was to start with the ceaseless attacks on his person and his marriage, the huge payouts to MDC councillors to vote against their party; and now the sinister plot outside of the MDC structures and platforms, which plot is to the effect that Tsvangirai must be removed from the body politic at all costs.

The “removal” ranges in nature from a sponsored coup to the murky and ghastly form of “removal” that only Zanu PF can muster. Zanu PF cannot discuss and plot around an MDC issue more than the MDC structures themselves. Surely, the Devil cannot be allowed to discuss the need for leadership renewal in Heaven. The forces of Hell cannot try to influence and rearrange the power dynamics of Heaven. Lucifer can never be an objective advocate for change in the power structure and the perking order in Heaven!

We refuse to be stampeded into a debate that has now turned more Zanu PF than MDC. Senior Zanu PF officials have confided in us that the party, particularly the chaos faction, are desperate for a leadership change in the MDC because Tsvangirai has caused them nightmares and remains the only portent threat to their agenda.

Given that Mugabe is in his sunset years, it would be in the best interest of the chaos faction for both Zanu PF and the MDC to have two new leaders so that there are two new brands on the political market in the near future. This is important, so the chaos faction reasons, because the Tsvangirai brand is so strong that it is not easy to erase from the national psyche.

Remove your leader, so they tell us, while we wait for ours to be removed by either natural or artificial factors so that the MDC will not have a head start over us!

The people of Zimbabwe know what Tsvangirai has done for them. They know how he rescued this country from the precipice and how he has demystified Robert Mugabe and taught this country that it is possible to have change within our lifetime. All the people of Zimbabwe want is the completion of the struggle.

The change of the driver of that struggle is not an issue among the grassroots supporters of the party and among the people of Zimbabwe. It is only a serious issue at Zanu PF headquarters and in the drunken discussions of pseudo-political analysts, power point revolutionaries and cyber activists.

On a people’s way to Canaan, Moses is never more of an issue than Pharaoh. This has always been a Pharaoh crisis and not a crisis of our Moses who is taking us to the new land of democracy, freedom and justice. It is Robert Mugabe, and not Tsvangirai, who is at the root of the national crisis and who has proven to be the human impediment to our national goal.

It’s Mugabe stupid! It is him who must go. So Tsvangirai will stick to his mandate that the people have given him. But to showcase the qualitative difference of leadership, notwithstanding his overwhelming popularity, Tsvangirai has allowed renewal in his party to be discussed and not to be swept under the carpet.

No-one in the party has disappeared or has been killed for expressing their opinion. Tsvangirai has made it clear that he will not stay a second longer if and when the people no longer want him. And he has always said he will not die in office but will give way to new leadership at the appropriate time, not when Zanu PF has hijacked the agenda, as it has now done!

Democracy runs in Tsvangirai’s blood. The people are his natural element and he is ready, anytime, to go to the people and engage with them.

Only next week, he kicks off his engagement programme with Zimbabweans in Masvingo province where he will meet the people in every district. The fact remains that our victory was stolen from us. You don’t tell your father that there is need for leadership renewal in the home when thieves break in and steal all the property, as Zanu PF has just done. The profitable discussion is not to depose the father but to discuss how to protect the home from burglars in the future.

The national mood is clear that after the greatest electoral theft of our time, it is the thieves and not the victims who must go. In the meantime, Tsvangirai goes nowhere.

He has the people’s mandate and a mission to accomplish. He has a nation to mollify, a generation to rescue and a heroic but despondent people to whom he must deliver hope, real change and transformation.

Fate has always thrown him at the deep end where he has survived every form of attack, even from the crocodiles! He remains our best foot forward!

Luke Tamborinyoka is the spokesperson to Morgan Tsvangirai. He writes in his personal capacity. He can be contacted at [email protected]