Hopewell Chin’ono – Chamisa supporters must learn from history

By Hopewell Chin’ono

Elections are not necessarily about bravado, faith and hope only, they are also about strategy, rationale and logic. Nelson “Wamba Dia Wamba” Chamisa’s supporters are high on unrestrained hope and faith and refusing to learn from lessons of not so long ago.

History is the best teacher as it holds the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it is empirical not prophetic.
History gives us the necessary tools to predict the future within reason.

Elections are not just a game of rallies but also a game of voting numbers.
Every vote counts in an election as we saw in 2013 and if the opposition thought 2013 was tough, 2018 is going to be tougher because they are not up against an ailing and geriatric Robert Mugabe.

A lot of MDC Alliance supporters are relying more on un-interrogated wisdom than on the real game of numbers, common sense & objective reality.

The break up of the MDCT into the Nelson Chamisa and Thokozane Khupe factions is only beneficial to ZANUPF parliamentary electoral chances and Emmerson Mnangagwa’s presidential bid.

The MDC Alliance needs Matabeleland under their electoral victory belt in order to even consider a realistic chance of winning the general election.

Without Matabeleland, it will be daydreaming to imagine a Nelson Chamisa presidential victory, an objective that will only become pursued but unattainable if the two protagonists fail to find common ground in resolving the leadership tussle that is now in the courts of law.

In 2013, the two MDCs of Morgan Tsvangirai and Welshman Ncube lost more than 7 seats to ZANUPF in Matabeleland South alone.

They would have won these seats had they fought as a United MDC.

That is an undeniable reality of elections, they are not won on emotions or hyperbole, they are won on grassroots engagement and on not dividing the vote.

They are won on making sure that you are as united as you can be.

The reason why Emmerson Mnangagwa is holding on to toxic ministers like Joram Gumbo, Supa Mandiwanzira, Obert Mpofu, David Parirenyatwa and Petronela Kagonye is for that very fact alone and nothing else.

He knows that they command variable grassroots support and if he got rid of them now, they would lead Bhora Musango campaigns against his presidential bid.

He also has to make a rational calculation on the votes he might lose for keeping them against the votes he will retain for not firing them, at least for now.

Thokozani Khupe represents such a mortal danger to Nelson Chamisa’s presidential bid and a real disaster for the MDC Alliance parliamentary prospects in Matabeleland.

Many in the MDC Alliance believe that Wamba is wildly popular and as such, he can go it alone.
Such a misplaced political calculation and infantile notion needs us to read the future with the aid of a rear view mirror perspective.

It is important to remind us of the fact that Morgan Tsvangirai was more popular than Wamba is today, but he lost 10 seats in Matabeleland South alone because of that disunity syndrome.

These parliamentary seats could have been retained if the two MDCs had fought as a united front.
Tsvangirai even lost Kwekwe Central to ZANUPF and yet the combined MDC vote was higher than that of ZANUPF.

MDC-T’s Blessing Chebundo lost to ZANUPF’s Masango Matambanadzo in Kwekwe by only 255 votes. If you add up the 508 votes that the smaller MDC’s Cathrine Bobo got, a united MDC would have won the seat by 253 votes.

That loss to ZANUPF was the unintended consequence of disunity, a political dashboard error that continues to infest the MDC’s thought process to this very day. The combined vote of the two MDCs would have won them 10 seats more than they got in Matabeleland South alone.

Today’s numbers at Khupe’s “congress” shows that she is not someone to recklessly dismiss. She will not win any presidential election even in fantasyland, but she is capable of stopping Wamba from any prospective victory both in parliament and in the presidential race.

If I were Wamba, I would sit down with her and cobble up a deal to see them through the elections then sort out the rest after the plebiscite. Wamba’s hardcore social base must understand that it is a game of numbers stupid!

I have seen a lot of memes mocking Thokozani Khupe and sometimes derogatively so, the post-election memes might be a joke on the Alliance comrades.

They are fighting a war with Khupe and yet they are failing to see that she has different political objectives to theirs. Hers is to stop Wamba, and Chamisa’s objective is to win the presidency.
One can’t deploy the same strategies for different desired outcomes.

Why would Emmerson Mnangagwa need to lose sleep about how to decapacitate the opposition when they are doing a very good job of it by themselves? What Mnangagwa needs is legitimacy and the reality is that he has the power of incumbency and runs the electoral machine.

Mnangagwa and his deputy, Constantino Chiwenga, put their heads on Mugabe’s block and they survived the guillotine treatment that many of their colleagues fell foul to.

They pulled the biggest Harry Houdini of our times by essentially putting tanks in the streets, getting their enemies not only to march for them but with them too, then getting away with the global censure that usually follows such military interventions.

They are not stupid and to imagine that they did all those unimaginable acts only to govern for seven months then hand over power peacefully to a divided opposition outfit, it requires Dr Dixon Chibanda, the famous Harare psychiatrist to examine those holding that view.

The MDC Alliance has lost its erstwhile friends in the western diplomatic community in Zimbabwe, more so Britain, the mother country that carries the ultimate western democratic moral dictate on Zimbabwe.

For any election in Zimbabwe to be discredited, it can only come from the Western alliance that includes Britain.

That alliance is desperately eager to see economic and political stability in Zimbabwe and Britain will call the shots according to a senior western diplomat. These are some of the things that the opposition and Wamba must bear in mind.

It won’t be an easy road unless if they fix their own internal problems and constitutional contradictions, the first one is to unite!

As they say, unite or die. I am not a descendent of a Jewish prophet and nobody needs to be one to understand these things that we should all hold to be self-evident a long as we are applying logic and restraining our emotions from empty rhetoric and slogans and also filtering partisanship mantras.

Wamba has a rag tag army of activists driving his agenda, Mngangagwa has state machinery, super powers and powerful businessmen with long pockets looking after their self interests.

Whilst the local media has focused on the deadwood he inherited from Robert Mugabe, they have ignored the sharp minds around him like Local Government minister July Moyo who was part of the team that set up the south Sudanese government.

He is the most influential and closest man to Emmerson Mnangagwa and yet he is unassuming whilst deadly and effective and some say the right hand man who plotted his rise to power.

For the first time in twenty years, I have heard white Zimbabweans talking about voting for ZANUPF, they say “I am voting for ED because he understands business’ adding that he is the only realistic hope for them.

For white Zimbabweans, there seems to be a natural mystic flowing through out the air and they keep saying that things will not be the way they used to be anymore.

They base these declaratory statements on what the president has promised them. I use Bob Marley’s wisdom to explain what we are hearing from ZANUPF’s erstwhile enemies these days, a distant thunder from six months ago when Robert Mugabe was in power.

Today I asked the son of the former education minister, David Coltart, about what he thought was the position of the white community regarding the elections and their preferred candidates.

Swinging back and forth in his office chair at his law chambers, human rights lawyer Doug Coltart said that generally speaking the white community is disconnected from the struggles of most Zimbabweans and are not that concerned about human rights and democracy.

He said that they are more interested in their personal comfort and securing their business interests, as is Zimbabwe’s black business elite class.

Like all the influential drivers to the Zimbabwean change project, they got tired and weary of fighting and have chosen to work with the most realistic options available to them, as opposed to the dogged pursuit of beautiful aspirations which seem distant to their immediate needs.

What will it take for Wamba and Khupe to realise that unity is strength and that it gives hope to those sitting on the fence? Perhaps the penny will drop for them when everyone walks away post election with a result that they would have helped to predetermine through their intransigence.

There won’t be a geriatric 94-year-old bogeyman to demonise, just a croc smiling once more with the top prize that has been elusive to the democratic project for 18 years.

As the saying goes, “to sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.”

Whilst hope and faith have become the intoxicating spiritual feed for Zimbabwe’s poor and desperate masses every Sunday morning, not all especially those controlling the levers of power will take note of the pastor’s parables and tales of a bulletin train futuristic tomorrow.

Wamba needs to think hard about the mistakes made by his recently departed mentor, Morgan Tsvangirai. Only history will give him a realistic picture of what the future might look like.

Emmerson Mnangagwa did not become president through a beauty contest, he visualised a reality he wanted to live in and worked hard for it to culminate including sitting on the same table with unpalatable characters. I am not sure if God was in it or not, but his dream came through, it did happen.

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is a CNN African journalist of the year and Harvard University Nieman Fellow. His next film, State of Mind looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe is coming out soon. He can be contacted on [email protected] or on twitter @daddyhope