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RADAR
SLOWLY Britain will come to realise that the project it created and sustained over the years in Zimbabwe is fast getting out of control. That its demands can be uppity and outrageous, and can never be satisfied by any government. That the MDC-T will not accept elections in Zimbabwe except on its own terms, with a predetermined outcome.
Britain will also soon realise that the danger to a peaceful democratic transition in Zimbabwe post-Mugabe is neither the military nor zanu-pf, but an opposition threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Stability and trade and commerce, which should sustain any society, must be subsumed to a Utopian form of democracy, which only the MDC-T under Nelson Chamisa can deliver, or else hell.
That is why, by hindsight, Chamisa’s recent trip to the United Kingdom was such a good event. It afforded him a fair platform to show the world what the Government of Emmerson Mnangagwa back in Zimbabwe must tolerate every day. Including constant threats of street violence.
More on the downside for the MDC-T and its leadership of course is how that trip two weeks ago has managed to show once again how African leaders were not always the stumbling block in their past mediation efforts in Zimbabwe, but an opposition used to getting uncritical support from the West, whose exaggerated claims of violence were never subjected to scrutiny.
The MDC-T under the late Morgan Tsvangirai happily made enemies all over Africa because it enjoyed the unqualified support of a Western world too fed up with Mugabe that the wildest claims against his Government had a ring of truth. The media obliged and indulged the narrative.
The party showed contempt for African opinion about what was good for everyone. Former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s “quiet diplomacy” was vilified, held up as the epitome of how African leaders were unfit to govern and how they supported despotic rulers.
Today the MDC-T under Chamisa is taking the UK head on. And the private media is egging him on. In Chamisa’s eyes, Britain doesn’t know what is good for itself and for Zimbabwe. Only Chamisa and his MDC-T know best. If Britain doesn’t dance to his script, there will be trouble in Zimbabwe.
“Trouble” for the UK began on the very day President Mnangagwa was inaugurated on November 24 2017. Although it didn’t show it then, it does appear the MDC-T resents the fact that Britain’s Africa minister then, Rory Stewart, not only attended the event, but was apparently the first Western envoy to meet the new President, and ED later boasted about it.
Then followed the Commonwealth Office represented by Simon McDonald, then British Minister of State Harriet Baldwin. That was before President Mnangagwa’s charm offensive to America and the UK in the person of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Retired Lt-Gen Dr Sibusiso Moyo.
The MDC-T couldn’t take any more of this dalliance. That relationship could not be allowed to blossom; not before an MDC-T government takes over the reins.
On his visit to the UK Chamisa let his impotent fury show, telling his unprepared hosts: “We have seen that there has been a bit of a shift on the part of the British government in terms of focusing more on political stability and trade and commerce at the expense of democracy. But that is a false narrative, you can never have stability without democracy,” Chamisa claimed.
By this week the “slight shift” had widened into a “chasm” and “yawning gap” between what Britain was expected to do by the MDC-T and what it is actually doing.
Chamisa wants Britain to “chaperone and superintend the transition in Zimbabwe”. His appeal to British officials was “we want you to help us” – get into power. In his cringe-worthy interview with Stephen Sackur, Chamisa even insinuated that a military intervention would be welcome to chaperone him into power.
This week the British, famed for their diplomatic etiquette and reticence when it comes to public spats, felt compelled to issue a mild rebuke to Chamisa and his party for their provocative accusations of bias in favour of ED.
In a statement on Tuesday, the British government said its officials engage with members of all main political parties and civic society organisations, before stating: “We believe that respectful, frank engagement with both the ruling party and the opposition is far more likely to succeed than public grandstanding or engaging with only one side. That is what we are doing.”
But the MDC-T would have loved it if they were the “one side”.
But even that is still to miss the point, and does not explain fully Chamisa’s frustration.
He came into Tsvangirai’s shoes over-prepared for an epic battle full of drama and confrontation with the old regime. Without realising there had been a seismic change, Chamisa thought he was taking over from where Tsvangirai left off, and hoping to outclass his mentor. In that battle between good and evil, he felt there would no moral ambivalence in the West about backing him and the MDC-T.
He has already established a reputation as a liar.
Today he traverses the country without interruption, campaigning as he wishes.
Yet his demands for political reform are unrelenting, belonging, as they do, to the Mugabe-Tsvangirai era, hence Chamisa insists on seeing Mugabe wherever there is Mnangagwa. That is what he wants the world to see, all the more to make his “victory” more spectacular, if he wins, or at least his fight to appear superhuman if he loses to monster Mugabe.
Any attempt to engage the Government seems set to undermine the image of himself that he wants to carve and project to the world. There is an ideal he has of a democracy which he wants to give to Zimbabwe, something in the sky. Instead of which he sees Britain’s realpolitik as an “inclination to align with one political party against another”, but misses an old political adage: there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests.
He had hoped that the British government would insist on return of the land to white former farmers. That’s regardless of what the Constitution of Zimbabwe states on the matter, and that Zimbabwe and Britain have in fact agreed that the farmers who lost land would be compensated according to the law, and that no property outside commercial land has been forcibly seized from anybody – black or white.
All that said, Chamisa’s outrage is fuelled also by a fear of a free, fair, transparent and credible election which President Mnangagwa has pledged. That should never be allowed to happen. He must have an alibi for losing; the nation must be haunted by a siege mentality should he lose.
So whichever way, it must seem that he lost unfairly; that if he wins, that victory must come despite, not due to lack of violence and rigging. So calls for reform will continue to mount, violence may be stage-managed for election observers, and Zanu-PF agent provocateurs manufactured. These are the challenges election observers must prepare themselves for.
That is why so far the MDC-T’s campaign trail doesn’t have a realistic message beside the tired, stale tale about democracy, and fantasies about bullet trains, spaghetti roads, and a $100 billion economy in eight years and ending the cash crisis in two weeks. Unbelievably, Chamisa thinks this is the message his “generation” will vote for.
Online Reporter