By Kudakwashe Mupanda
Human beings are strange creatures at the best of times – and under pressure we become stranger still. Psychologists would have a field day analysing human behaviour in Zimbabwe.
The latest manifestation of the bizarre comes from the debate around MDC-T and Morgan Tsvangirai’s leadership. It has been very odd to witness the intensity of the backlash against suggestions that the MDC should look at leadership renewal.
We seem to have here a case of what psychologists call co-dependency. This is a condition where one person manipulates and controls a second person who has a drug addiction or other serious problem.
The first person is often a narcissist (someone of over-developed ego and self-importance), while the second person gets meaning in life from being excessively and psychotically concerned with the well-being of the first person, even though that person is using and abusing them.
It can also happen in a group context, where an individual or small group manipulates a second group.
Another aspect of this phenomenon is that when the controlling individual or group is threatened by an outsider, the second individual or group will viciously attack the outsider, despite the fact that intervention is exactly what the dependent needs to escape the abusive relationship.
Zimbabwe, where many people have serious problems (be they related to money, opportunity, self-esteem, hope and so on), is ripe for co-dependent relationships. We see it in the relationship between the youth militia and Zanu chefs.
Narcissism and co-dependency lie at the very heart of Zanuism, beginning with the arch-narcissist, Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
Sadly, it seems that we are also seeing it in MDC-T. There is no other rational explanation for why Tsvangirai’s followers have reacted so excessively to demands for leadership renewal.
The identities of the outsiders who have threatened to rock the boat – in this case Roy Bennett, Ian Kay and others – is largely irrelevant. It is the fact that they have threatened to undermine a co-dependent relationship that is causing the problems.
Let us look at this from another perspective. In any functional political party, it would be entirely reasonable – and accepted as normal – for open calls to be made for a leader to step down after failing to deliver victory for his party.
And in Tsvangirai’s case, he has failed not once but five consecutive times (2000, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2013). In December 2012, feigning humility, he promised to finally step down if he lost. Fast forward eight months and he is using the excuse that he would have won if not for election rigging. Yet that is a non-argument. Zimbabwe is not a democracy as he himself has pointed out on many occasions.
In 2013, he complained many times about Nikuv in advance of the elections, yet he ran headlong into them. From the beginning, the centrepoint of Tsvangirai’s leadership mandate was to find ways of securing a transfer of power within the context of what is effectively a military dictatorship.
He has failed to do so. Period. The captain of a ship that sinks cannot later argue that if he had not been on the high seas his vessel would not have sunk – and therefore he should not be dismissed. No. Tsvangirai is now simply adding tomfoolery to failure.
However, as an apparent narcissist in the mould of those he claims to oppose, the MDC-T president is actively encouraging his co-dependents to attack at every turn the infidels who dare to suggest he has failed.
Psychology tells us that the narcissist will actively and continually do so even though his tenure is inflicting further harm on his co-dependents. Meanwhile his co-dependents will fight ever more viciously even though the relationship is destroying them.
They will go on defending their boss, using any trick in the book to delay the threat of change (‘not till 2016′, ‘not till 2018′) and plotting the harm of the outsiders even though the engines are on fire and the machine is plummeting to the ground.
As final impact looms, the co-dependents will also attack each other in their efforts to demonstrate their zeal to the narcissist. They will destroy each other over positions on a doomed ship.
Of course, I expect also to be attacked for stating the obvious, but that will merely prove my point. MDC-T is in the death grip of co-dependency and cannot hope to survive unless the suffocating hold of this group is broken.
Far from being a party of change, it has become a party of retrogression and stagnation.
If MDC-T is determined to maintain the status quo on the Titanic for much longer, sane Zimbabweans better jump overboard or find a new ship – the next congress or elections are far too far away.
By then Tsvangirai and his inmates in the asylum will be scraping along the bottom, 2018 metres below sea level.
Kudakwashe Mupanda is an independent analyst studying in the United States
