Tsvangirai is a time waster: Courage Shumba

By Courage Shumba

Today we must ask ourselves. What are our thoughts as we continue to exist in the shadows of a government that has forgotten its purpose? What is leadership unless there are followers who believe in the path being taken ?

Does Mugabe’s government protect and advance or undermine the idea of our liberation and the sacrifices made for its sake?

Let us briefly reflect on the dangers that exist and could possibly counter or undermine our hope as a nation for a government we deserve. For three decades we were the hostages of a brutal dictatorship.

For three decades we were led under a kleptocratic tyranny which personalised both national power and wealth. Out of frustration we formed a resistance to protect basic human rights and to demand accountability. That struggle is alive.

That struggle rages on under a new climate of confusion which needs clarity, which demands that the courageous must stand up to takeover and reclaim for our majority what is at heart a sensitive and collective liberational matter.

Since 1999 Tsvangirai was at the helm of the opposition as its leader. There is no doubt that he was the brave face of the movement but it broke down into factions under his watch. What was a gigantic national movement perished and faded under Morgan Tsvangirai.

Its main agenda to get rid of Mugabe’s system of government and replace it with an open, democratic and patriotic nationalist government failed spectacularly and miserably under his watch.

As it emerged he had been preoccupied with women and other escapades for which there is little point to get into the detail of, except to mention that he slept at the wheel and betrayed a national struggle in so doing. The MDC-T he leads is convinced they have the right man for the job.

They believe that the rest of the people who have called on Tsvangirai and his executive to go are sympathisers of the ruling party, or CIO implants or rogue pro-status quo malcontents who are thriving under the prevalent economic and political chaos.

There is a belief system that we owe to this MDC -T leadership, what Zanu PF supposes we owe them for being liberated and that any disquiet about the scope and quality of leadership is treasonous or amounts to poisoning the national psyche.

If Tsvangirai is as good as we must be made to believe why is he not in power ? Why was he not prepared for the election on July 31? Why did he enter the race if he was not sure of its legitimacy? What was the mandate of the GNU during his premiership and what were his achievements?

What are his achievements today? What is it that he wants to do tomorrow that he could not do yesterday?

Tsvangirai is a time waster who will bring the dream of a free Zimbabwe into permanent ruin. Tsvangirai will sponsor anarchy, apathy and splinter movements such that the rest of our people will simply dismiss politics and disappear under the radar never to resurface.

Others will find the fight against tyranny hopeless that they will join Mugabe and his cronies at the feeding trough. Tsvangirai sat his political examination, and decision by decision we are further away from what we seek to attain than when we started.

We are like a group of people being led by fools.

Let us examine Tsvangirai’s policies on indigenous ownership of resources. He believed that the majority had no business in the ownership of land or industry. He believed that we were the toiling masses and all we wanted from our resource basket was to work for foreigners. He is wrong.

No one in his right mind can form a party and expect ululation from the very people he wishes to turn into a slave market. What makes him think that the rest of our people do not want a bite of the cherry?

What is it about him that makes him think only he is fit and proper for the luxuries of the high seas? What sort of economic policy can we drain out of a mind that has no imagination outside the poison of a look west culture when west is looking east?

Whose President does he want to be? Are we that foolish to be led by a man so drunk in colonial hangover?

Now ask him what he meant when he accepted that he slept at the wheel over the July 31 election? What was the rest of his executive doing as he left the road and headed for the bush in his slumber?

Can our struggle afford this level of inconvenience and liability when the very security and stability of our people is at stake? Are we sure that we can exchange and gamble the security and stability of millions of our people to respect and safeguard the lifestyles of a few incompetent opportunists masquerading as visionaries at Harvest House ?

Are we prepared to be led by Tsvangirai into another defeat either because he is cheated or because he is dozing off at the wheel? Is that our philosophy that a punctured tyre will never be changed until the vehicle is running on the iron rods and can’t go anywhere leaving us stuck and stranded?

What is the cost to us as a people of allowing weak, gullible and dogmatic people at the fore of our struggle instead of intelligible, practical realists who can secure victories and compromises until we have acceptable permanent mutual settlements?

Do we not have the zeal to want to move on and to rebuild our country and leave the past behind us?

In the fours years Tsvangirai was in office he wasted time and energy fighting for the generals, the provincial governors, the central bank governor, the attorney general to be sacked instead of harnessing or developing a mutual strategy for change.

He wasted time running around international and regional cities complaining about Mugabe instead of infiltrating the electorate winning hearts and minds.

He is the same man who asks that we look away and allow him to stand again in the name of us the people who have had enough of Mugabe and his system of government. He treats the situation we face as if it was some weekend pastime with no consequence, that in-spite of the nature and quality of his leadership.

Tsvangirai fails to realise that for some of us the dismantling of Mugabe’s system of rule, its components and features is an urgent task.

Mugabe himself will crumble with age leaving behind a legacy that is both dangerous and counter-revolutionary where leaders, no matter how weak and incompetent can only be replaced when dead.

Tsvangirai has been absorbed into this psyche threatening both the bigger revolution and its faithfuls and his crumbling party with its loyalists.

The faithfuls of the bigger revolution know better than a fly that follows a corpse into the grave. We have a duty to this revolution and to the unfinished business of the liberation: to make Zimbabweans a better people and Zimbabwe a better country.

The spirit of freedom is the soul of this struggle. It is religious. It cannot be shaken, it cannot be individualised. It cannot bastardised. It will transfer to the hands of those who hold its mission seriously. Until then the leadership of this struggle shall change hands.

Lets go back to the drawing board. I Remember the Working People’s Convention of 1999. I remember the delegates. Its their time now.

Courage Shumba is a former student leader at the University of Zimbabwe