Why does everyone want to be the President?

By Hopewell Chin’ono

I see that Fadzayi Mahere has launched her 2018 election campaign today (Wednesday) and I hear that Nkosana Moyo will be following soon with his Presidential bid and Linda for Harare Central.

Making such a pronouncement about entering public life means that one’s views and actions are also now subject to thorough public scrutiny.

Running for office in any democratic country is a constitutional right which nobody should interfere with.

However, we are not in a democratic country, we live under a brutal dictatorship where the very constitution is not adhered to and government ministers are challenged and threatened by military generals, so the assumed prescriptive idea that it’s one’s democratic right to do as they wish should be tempered with realism and soberness.

We could all run as independents, but to what end?

What Zimbabwe needs right now is the loosening of Mugabe’s grip which the MDC has been doing and hopefully that will culminate in the eventual release of the 37 year-old hold that Mugabe has had on this country.

This can not be logically done by splitting the vote. The opposition vote is different from the ZANU vote.

ZANU supporters are fundamentalists, they don’t waver, the opposition vote is not like that. It can be split.

What all progressives need to do is unite under one tent and fight as one group against the common enemy.

This is not an election about ideology, it is an election about life or the slow death of a country.

The same thing happened in 2008 with Simba Makoni and we all know what happened.

We must learn from such lessons that a divided opposition is an own goal and a tacit endorsement of a continued Mugabe hegemony.

I know that there will be a lot of yelping about individual rights and the right of citizens to run for any office they wish to occupy, but such yelping will only expose lack of understanding of how politics work especially in Zimbabwe and how rights can be detached from achievable and tangible goals.

A divided opposition will not energize voters to go to the polling booths.

It will simply disillusion people from believing that their vote counts for something.

Is that what we want?

What is splitting the vote? The two MDCs lost a big chunk of the Matebeleland vote and parliamentary seats to ZANUPF and yet the two MDCs had a big combined vote tally than that of ZANUPF.

They lost because they split their vote and ZANUPF won.

The independents will get the dwindled middle class vote and that of the uninitiated political thinkers who would have ordinarily voted for a coalition.

The common thread that I hear of is that Tsvangirai is not smart.

Why not go into the coalition and be the smart ones to infuse the change that you want?

Why does everyone want to be the President?

I will end this by saying a divided opposition is as good as working for ZANUPF.

There is no other better way of putting it.

There will be champagne popping on ZANUPF dinner tables tonight, celebrating this humongous taking of self delusion to new heights.

This can be reversed by Independents seeking space in a coalition and allow their skills to be used in a collective way.

Dividing an ever decreasing cake among a growing list of Presidential and MP wannabes is playing right into ZANU PF’s hands.

God. Bless our country Zimbabwe and may we be guided by common sense not egos on all sides of the political spectrum!

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Documentary Filmmaker and International Television Journalist.