By Moses Tofa
The leadership renewal question which the MDC is battling with today is what I can refer to as “the hijacked inconvenient truth”.
It is indeed true that after successive electoral defeats, particularly the decapitating defeat during the 2013 elections, it is time the MDC think of resuscitating itself via leadership renewal.
However, this is the truth which even those who are espousing it are not willing to face. It is indeed true that elections have been rigged but there is not a vestige of doubt that the MDC has failed to deliver the much anticipated change. This is not to say that the party will fail in the future but its chances of success have significantly dwindled.
The problem is that those who are calling for leadership renewal have a parochial and egoistic as opposed to a comprehensive and candid approach to this imperative. As a result, they egregiously hijacked it.
The leadership renewal debate cannot be exclusively about Tsvangirai but about the structures of the party in their entirety. The reason as to why the debate focuses on Tsvangirai is because of the understanding that those who are at the apex of the MDC are responsible for the party’s failure to unseat Mugabe.
If that is true, then the Mangomas and the Bitis (by virtue of their positions) are inescapably responsible for this failure. It is only the margin, nature and content of failure that differs from individual to individual but the failure is undeniably collective. Biti and company have therefore individualised the collective accountability. It is true that Tsvangirai made many politically lethal acts of commission and omission but this is beyond the focus of this article.
By absolving themselves and imposing all the blame on Tsvangirai, Biti and camp deliberately skirted the inconvenient truth which they are purporting to pursue. To put it succinctly, they exploited the convenient side of the inconvenient truth.
To put the MDC’s disputes in their proper context, Biti’s actions were not necessarily triggered by Tsvangirai’s response to Mangoma’s letter (but this is not to exonerate the response). By the time Mangoma presented his letter to Tsvangirai, the die had already been cast. It is therefore patently erroneous to say that the response was responsible for the second bifurcation of the MDC.
Biti’s strategy is essentially two-pronged. Plan A is to unseat Tsvangirai and assume leadership of the MDC while plan B is to form another political party. Having realised that plan A is difficult, Biti elected to pursue plan B via plan A because he thought that this is more strategic than to go straight to plan B.
In this context, the primary purpose of plan A is not to seize control of the MDC but to undermine Tsvangirai as much as possible. One way is to demonstrate that there is a gulf between his and Tsvangirai’s political astuteness, especially given Biti’s touted intellectual standing. The underbelly of Biti’s strategy is to conflate his so called intellect and pragmatic appeal.
Being “educated” does not make someone a good politician. That is why Mutambara and Ncube are now busy farming and I am sure that their potatoes and vegetables are flooding Mbare Msika. That is why the fledgling Economic Freedom Fighters has managed to get more that 6 percent of the votes in the recent elections despite that Malema’s status of education is impoverished. Biti should know that there are intricate productive and counter-productive outputs which are meshed in his strategy.
Biti’s lethal miscalculation is that there is an intrinsic relationship between his attacks on Tsvangirai and his ascendancy on the political front. In other words, he thinks that the more he demonstrates that he is shrewd than Tsvangirai the more he will attract mass support.
Instead, the more he wrestles with Tsvangirai the more he will be perceived as fighting a ZANU PF agenda. Biti is compromising his political fortunes because he is busy burying himself in the quicksand of mistrust. People cannot repose their support in a political party which they do not trust.
The trajectory of opposition politics in Zimbabwe has taught us that once an opposition political party is suspected to be clandestinely working in collaboration of ZANU PF, the party will automatically scare scores of potential supporters.
ZANU PF is determined to manipulate this fissure to infiltrate the opposition and make it virtually insignificant. There is not a vestige of doubt that there was an occult ZANU PF hand in the recent ruling by the speaker of parliament. While the ‘hands off’ approach which was adopted by the speaker of parliament is legally sound, it is primarily based on political considerations.
It was a merit to ZANU PF because the political considerations seemed to be consistent with the legal merits of the case. The political considerations are to perpetuate the struggles until or even beyond the 2018 elections. The occult hands which influenced the parliament’s ruling will surely influence the courts.
Biti’s confidence appears not to be only based on his shrewdness when it comes to legal issues but on the knowledge that ZANU PF and by implication the courts will be on his side. But let him have no illusion because ZANU PF is not interested in the viability of his project but the party wants to use it to weaken Tsvangirai and once that is achieved, Biti becomes the prey.
The other thing is that ZANU PF knows that Biti will not be a force which can challenge its hegemony. The final winner in the struggle will be neither Bit nor Tsvangirai but ZANU PF.
The other counter-productive side of Biti’s strategy is that it is highly likely that the more he wrestles with Tsvangirai, the more he makes him stronger than before. We should remember that when ZANU PF arrested Tsvangirai, beat him and put him on a treason trial, many people sympathised with him that he became more and more popular.
That he suffered the excesses of ZANU PF made him regarded as the doyen and apotheosis of opposition politics in Zimbabwe despite many of his failures in his personal and political characters. Biti’s actions can invoke the determination to heighten support for Tsvangirai among MDC supporters.
Tsvangirai may be undermined by the parliament and the courts but may gain support on the grassroots. Biti is fighting from the wrong front. The battle is fought and won via grassroots support. Numbers are more important than the parliament and the courts.
Biti is also skirting the truth. For example, he says that the reason as to why they decided not to pursue the leadership renewal agenda via congress is that the elections will be rigged. The patent truth is that Biti knew that he cannot stand a chance against Tsvangirai hence the decision to pre-empt the congress.
Not only that Biti is on the wrong side of history but his strategies have been outdistanced by the very history which he wants to make. What then shall we say? The truth is that Biti is making headlines while he is walking down the deceitfully broad but realistically narrow road towards the end of history. It will not be long before Biti unceremoniously disappear from the radar of Zimbabwean politics.
Moses Tofa can be contacted on [email protected]
