By Nobleman Runyanga
Following the launch of its RELOAD policy document, which turned out to be a damp squib, the MDC last week announced its intention to embark on what it described as Reload rallies throughout the country. The aim of the rallies is to mobilise (read incite) some people into confronting Government through protests.
While the country is facing challenges such as power shortages, it is evident that the MDC is now turning to the ongoing economic challenges to justify its baseless itch for confronting President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Government. The reason is not to assist the people as the opposition party wishes the world to believe but to create some opportunity for its senior members to be squeezed into Government. The MDC has never been about ordinary people unless one is talking of people in the senior ranks of the party. The way its elected councillors have run down most urban local authorities under their stewardship over the past two decades attests to this observation.
The MDC is claiming that it is being pushed by the plight of the people in view of the ongoing austerity measures. This is far from the truth. The party is opportunistically using the ongoing economic challenges to cause mayhem in the country, draw the attention of the world and cause international intervention which, it hopes, could see the country going for early polls. One, however, wonders how the opposition party hopes to win if it failed to win council by-elections in Bikita and Nyanga despite dispatching senior party members such as the excitable deputy chairman, Job Sikhala for campaign meetings.
The Bikita and Nyanga results were not surprising. Chamisa literary handed over 30 July to President Mnangagwa and ZANU PF the moment he opened his (Chamisa’s) mouth to campaign. He stood better chances of unseating ZANU PF than did his predecessor, the late Morgan Tsvangirai before him. This is because he enjoyed unprecedented political freedom to traverse the whole country addressing over 70 campaign rallies due to the opening up of the democratic space by the new administration.
He, however, squandered the opportunity because of his poor message, lack sound ideology and practical party programmes to improve the electorate’s lives. Instead of finding out the electorate’s concerns and anxieties and addressing them, Chamisa told them what he thought they needed. Instead of addressing basic needs such as clinics, road repairs and boreholes among others, he spoke of unneeded village airports, and spaghetti roads. This exposed him and his party as out-of-touch with the needs of the rural electorate which has always been the decider of overall election winners in Zimbabwe. The poor messaging in the MDC runs deep in the party. Instead of Sikhala addressing the electorate’s concerns he preached the party’s plans to overthrow President Mnangagwa.
For the past one year the MDC has doggedly clung to the falsehood that Zimbabwe could not move forward because it had a legitimacy crisis based on the baseless claims which the party’s leader, Nelson Chamisa has been making. His contention is that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) rigged the 30 July 2018 presidential election in favour of President Mnangagwa but embarrassingly failed to back his claim with irrefutable evidence when the Constitutional Court gave him an opportunity to do so when it heard his electoral petition in August last year.
The party has taken its case to the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) among other international bodies but none was prepared to touch Chamisa even with a long pole. No one wants to willingly get its reputation soiled by entertaining the immature opposition politician. President Mnangagwa recently took over the chairmanship of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security which most progressive Zimbabweans noted as the regional bloc’s endorsement of the President’s win.
Recently, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU) and the United States (US) Department of State endorsed Government’s economic turnaround efforts through the Transitional Stabilisation Programme (TSP) and indicated that the country was in the right direction. It is clear that Chamisa and his senior party members are increasingly finding themselves standing alone in their anti-Government stance. While some Western countries have over the past two decades wished an MDC leader to win the country’s Presidency, the former MDC leader the late Morgan Tsvangirai’s 20-year failure to unseat ZANU PF and Chamisa’s loss have left most of them with no choice except to accept the reality of ZANU PF continuing in power for the foreseeable future due to its sound ideology and pro-people policies.
This is the reason why most Western countries are joining the rest of the progressive world in making calls for all stakeholders to come together and chart the way forward for Zimbabwe as a united people. Realising that he stands to lose any claim to the baseless poll theft charges, which have sustained some form of tolerance of him among the MDC members for the past year, Chamisa is insisting on what he terms the illegitimacy of President Mnangagwa.
This is because the moment he accepts President Mnangagwa’s win he accepts defeat, loses relevance in the party and opens the door for one of his deputies, Tendai Biti who has been breathing down his neck and readying himself to take over the party in preparation for 2023. The opposition politician is between a rock and a hard place. His Western handlers have been charmed by President Mnangagwa and his administration’s ongoing reforms and have been convinced to give it a chance. They have also come to the realisation that they cannot keep funding a hopeless cause forever. They cannot avenge forever for the land reform programme by supporting the MDC. Given this scenario, one understands why Chamisa is increasingly cutting a lone and desperate figure.
That Chamisa and his party are growing isolated, desperate and frustrated would not quite worry the country if the matter was not turning into a dangerous threat to national peace and security. In desperation, the MDC is threatening protests, which would obviously be destructive and violent as before, impeachment and war against President Mnangagwa and Government.
The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) which, lately, has become the MDC’s running dogs and organisers of the latter’s anti-Government’s initiatives, has been threatening to unleash protests in the country using the ongoing economic challenges as an excuse. Despite his public bravado, Chamisa has been “playing it safe” by not openly sending his party members into the streets.
Since the Motlanthe Commission indicated his party’s culpability in the 1 August 2018 incident, Chamisa is preserving his skin at the expense of ordinary people in his party. The ZCTU leader, Peter Mutasa has been playing the organising front for the party in anticipation of positions in the party. If anything lays bare Chamisa and the MDC’s frustration, it is their prevarication on the definite dates of their so-called protests. One day Chamisa tells his blind followers that he would give them a signal and only over the weekend he said that no signal would be given arguing that the prevailing economic challenges would force the people onto the streets. He is avoiding personal responsibility for the outcome of the planned protests.
In life when everything else fails, people resort to religion. After failing at everything Chamisa is resorting to religion. Last weekend Chamisa called for “prayer, fasting and intercession for peace and unity.” Those who know the party would be aware that the justification is a euphemism for the admission that it has run out of ideas. He and his party are at their wits’ end.
