Why Biti and Mangoma renewal plot was doomed: Wilbert Mukori

By Wilbert Mukori

“With party leader Morgan Tsvangirai ratcheting up the pressure on the rebels, as well as his grassroots campaigns (and he clearly has the numbers on his side), the renewal team is finding itself well and truly up the creek — without a paddle to row back to terra firma,” said the Daily News reporter. Well that says it all and beautifully too. 

The report was talking of Tendai Biti and Elton Mangoma who had branded themselves the MDC renewal team who initially threatened to break away but now seem to have developed cold feet. They are back negotiating to be allowed back in the MDC. (Mangoma has since been expelled).

The MDC rebels were claiming that the MDC under Tsvangirai’s leadership had abandoned the party’s founding principles and values especially its promise to bring democratic change. There is no thinking Zimbabwean or outsider who would argue about that.

Everyone raised their eyebrows, right up like Ethiopia’s Chilada baboons, when the rebels said they were reclaiming the long forgotten MDC founding principles and values. Alarm bells started ringing; they could not have rung louder if a known prostitute said she was a virgin!

Both Tendai Biti and Elton Mangoma had been the MDC’s chief negotiators of the GPA and so they knew the agreement has stipulated that the GNU was to implement a raft of democratic reforms, for example. The two had very senior positions in the party and in the GNU to have forced the implementation of the said reforms.

By implementing the reforms the MDC would have fulfilled its key promise of bring meaningful democratic reforms to Zimbabwe. We know that after five years of this GNU not even one reform was implemented.

So before anyone can believe that these rebels are serious about delivering democratic change people want to know what has happened to make them remember MDC’s founding principles and to recommit themselves to living up to these values?

Short of a “Saul on the road to Damascus” or “Homer Simpson lost in the frozen vastness of Alaska” moment; no thinking person will believe the rebels are not the same self-seeking and breathtakingly incompetent individuals the whole world has come to know Tsvangirai and his fellow MDC leaders, including Biti and Mangoma, to be.

Tsvangirai and the MDC have made so many blunders in the last few years they have lost all political credibility. To regain the people’s trust and confidence, it is not enough for any of them to just say they are reclaiming the founding values and restate old promises but more significant they must explain why they betrayed the people by forgetting the values their past promises.

The rebels did not have an epiphany moment, offered no pithy explanation why they had abandoned the old values and they did not even apologize for betraying the nation so recklessly. All they had to say was that it was all Tsvangirai’s fault and they were reclaiming the founding values as if that act alone is guarantee they will deliver.

At least with Tsvangirai, the people know he is incompetent, has no principles and will hang on to power like barnacles to a whale regardless of his failures and what the constitution says.

Tsvangirai does not try to rebrand himself in anyway; what you see – a blundering incompetent – is what you get. The rebels, on the other hand, pretended to be principled leaders, the one thing they are not; that is why they are up the creek without a paddle!