Hopewell Chin’ono: “Firing Khupe will be a reflection of power without responsibility”
By Hopewell Chin’ono
I am hearing that some Nelson Chamisa supporters are urging their faction to expel Thokozani Khupe when their national chairpersons meet in Harare. Well, his supporters will say so because they are high on their new found party presidential power.
Whoever is advising the new leader does not possess a political mind in my view!
Firing Khupe will be a reflection of a power without responsibility mentality, a mob psychology mentality which thinks about today and not the long game. I want all rational thinking compatriots to remember this prediction.
If Khupe is expelled tomorrow as Chamisa’s henchmen are saying on social media, Chamisa will not have any fighting chance for the State house to talk about and this will signal the end of the MDCT as we know it today.
No MDC-T leader can win the presidency without Matabeleland. They need Matabeleland in as much as they need to hold on to their urban vote.
Khupe is not a Joshua Nkomo figure but she is now seen as the representative of the Matabele people in the MDCT, that is why her abuse has elicited so much revulsion in that part of the country.
Expelling her will be seen as an extension of a tribal agenda in the MDCT to use Metebeleland as a region for providing votes with nothing in return. More like a go to place during elections only. A place where its leaders are appointed for symbolism or political tokenism.
Nelson Chamisa is NO Morgan Tsvangirai either, his short time at the helm of the MDCT has shown how a polarizing figure he is as opposed to Morgan Tsvangirai.
He needs to be conciliatory and magnanimous to his adversaries as opposed to being unnecessarily combative and yet reckless!
The reason sighted for wanting to expel Khupe is that she wasn’t attending party meetings at Harvest House which is the MDCT Headquarters.
She is also accused of being opposed to the Alliance which brought together briefcase parties led by Tendai Biti, Welshman Ncube and Agrippa Mutambara among others.
Khupe’s supporters are saying that she had good reason not to attend those meetings because she had been beaten up by Shaky Mukoyi’s Vanguard militia, an MDCT militant group comprised of violent thugs. How could she come for meetings at Harvest House when the thugs that beat her up are resident there her supporters have argued?
She was opposed to the Alliance because in her view, it brought together elements like Welshman Ncube who have nothing to offer and who were responsible for splitting the party in 2006.
It is quite evident that Welshman and Tendai Biti were now in the political Siberia, only being relevant at think tank dialogues whilst lacking in grass roots support.
The Alliance is to them what water is to fish, without it they will simply die politically.
Welshman has been lately telling anyone who cared to listen how Morgan Tsvangirai confided in him that he wanted Nelson Chamisa to take over the party.
According to Ncube, Morgan Tsvangirai anointed Chamisa and he was a witness to the anointing.
This is breathtaking coming from a constitutional lawyer who left the MDC in 2006 because as he called it then, it had become a party of thugs and unconstitutionalism.
So what has changed now for Welshman to come back? How does a constitutional lawyer support political leadership anointing as opposed to an elective congress where the party’s custodians chose their own leader of choice?
Are free and fair elections and constitutionalism only relevant at national level and not political parties?
What changed is that Thokozani Khupe has become the opposition godmother in Matebeleland and Welshman Ncube is now so insignificant in regards to representation and influence that he couldn’t even find his way into parliament in 2013.
The only game in town for him was joining the opposition coalition which Morgan Tsvangirai coined the Alliance.
In this Alliance, they had to allocate seats to all these briefcase parties as part of the deal. This is where Khupe became incensed when Tsvangirai allocated 32 seats to Welshman Ncube’s party. Currently he only has one seat in parliament which is held by an MP who refuses to take orders from him.
Morgan Tsvangirai cobbled up the Alliance because he was desperate to do anything that could see him beat Robert Mugabe in what he considered to be the last chance to win the presidential election.
When Khupe resisted this Alliance idea, she became enemy number one to those close to Morgan Tsvangirai resulting in the beating she got from Vanguard thugs in August last year.
Whenever there was a meeting tabled, she requested to meet at a neutral venue in fear of a repeat beating, requests which were turned down.
The idea of a coalition was noble but it is the mechanics that stirred the pot and got people like Khupe angry. Now, the issue has been inflamed by the violence against Khupe at Morgan Tsvangirai’s funeral and the tribal slurs thrown at her.
This has upset the people of Matebeleland as they see this as an attack on them through Khupe.
That is the problem with using mobs, they don’t think through the repercussions of their actions.
It is always about today and it’s mean to dehumanize not to engage.
Khupe was never a national leader, she curved her space in Matabeleland, and there she is the main ingredient of opposition politics. This confirms what we already know that our people vote for personalities and not ideas and policies.
They are loyal to individuals and will be happy to see constitutionalism thrown out of the window as long as it facilitates their candidate’s path as we have seen with Chamisa.
If people voted for ideas and policies then it wouldn’t matter who was at the helm of the party, the determinant factor would have been the values and policies of that political party.
Since we vote for personalities, Chamisa will find the going tough in Matebeleland if he expels Khupe.
Welshman Ncube does not have the grass roots appeal that Khupe holds in Matebeleland.
Both Welshman Ncube and Tendai Biti are washed up politicians who are opportunistically backing Nelson Chamisa in order to find political space and relevance. They have nothing to offer in terms of a social base except maybe their social media presence and exaggerated intelligence.
This is the time that Chamisa should have used to rally and unite his troops rather than expelling major political personalities four months before an election.
The MDC-T will lose dismally if they take that route.
Politics is about having a helicopter view, what many call a bird’s eye view and not just looking at narrow personal political interests.
If Khupe joins Nkosana Moyo, they will lock down Matabeleland leaving the MDCT to rely on other urban areas outside Matabeleland. That will not be enough for Chamisa to win the presidency because he will still have to fight a huge battle in the rest of rural Zimbabwe.
We all know that rural Zimbabwe is ZANU PF country. Their only legitimate threat is Joice Mujuru, she doesn’t have the largesse to dole out goodies to the rural vote.
She will be crashed by ZANUPF’s power of incumbency and access to the national purse. So Matebeleland is a MUST win for the MDCT and Chamisa if they are to entertain any chances of dislodging ZANUPF and Emmerson Mnangagwa.
There is NO doubt that Chamisa is surrounded by sycophants and people with less political acumen but loads of emotion and reckless youthful exuberance. Morgan Tsvangirai used to keep these excitable fellows in check, now they are in charge.
The amount of inflammatory posts sent out on social media by Chamisa’s right hand-men show an inability to grasp what is at stake. These posts insult Khupe, Mwonzora, Obert Gutu and anyone who disagrees with Nelson Chamisa. This in the eyes of many floating voters is unpalatable. They are doing everything possible not to win the upcoming election.
An insult to Khupe does not upset her alone, it affects everyone who identify with her politically and each one of them is a vote gone. That is what I mean when I speak about having a political mind and acumen to understand the relatedness of things.
In politics many hangers on will support anyone who promises them a job, that is why it is important to have advisors who don’t live off your financial benevolence. You need advisors who tell you what you must hear and not what you want to hear.
If indeed Nelson Chamisa carries through the threat to fire Khupe, he might as well kiss goodbye to his dream of getting to 1 Chancellor Avenue in June of 2018 in this election. It will be a dream killed and perhaps deferred depending on whether he will survive the political fall out after an election defeat.
This will embolden the Matebeleland opposition vote to go it alone and use their vote as a kingmaker to whoever offers them a better deal and also respects them as equal partners and not recipients of affirmative action political positions.
This impasse and embarrassing comedy show of political errors and drama can only end if they all agree to sit down and talk and go to an emergency elective congress.
Chamisa mocked Khupe for mourning about his elevation to Acting President. He said, “You can go (to) Jupiter, Mars or wherever and this will not change. This thing belongs to the people and if there is any query go to Harvest House.”
It is ironic that he is refusing to subject himself to very people who are the stakeholders of the party and not the party elites who the other side accuses of being bought. How Chamisa handles this will show whether he is a leader or not. Time will tell as tomorrow is only a day away.
Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning journalist and filmmaker. He is also a CNN African journalist of the year and Harvard University Nieman fellow. He can be contacted at [email protected]
