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MORGAN Tsvangirai’s wife, Elizabeth Macheka, has left him for as-yet-to-be-explained reasons. The couple had been barelymarried for six months.For a man who lost his wife in a horrific car crash in 2009, then impregnated a 21-year-old supporter within months, married another woman and dumped her within days before more than half-a-dozen known sex trysts with different women, very little about the MDC-T leader’s love life still has shock value.
But we will tell you what really beggars belief: his MDC-T party still considers him a fit and proper person to put forward as their candidate for the highest office in the land.
For a man who was winched from the deepest depths of a mine shaft in Bindura, from virtual obscurity and academic penury, and thrust in a position he so richly didn’t deserve, didn’t qualify to hold, you really cannot begrudge Tsvangirai for trying to hold on to the MDC-T leadership.
For him, leadership is a lifestyle, a job. What pleasure — apart from his open-zip policy — can substitute getting deliveries of briefcases loaded with Western money, puppet rewards?
His nostrils are too far deep in the feeding trough for him to smell the burning political hay around him. But what the country must now question, legitimately, is why his MDC-T party is turning our national politics into a sick joke. Successful countries the world over have a strong opposition, and the contest for the greatest ideas to advance their countries is what occupies national headlines.
In Zimbabwe, we have a sleazeball as leader of the opposition, and a party too terrified to question, to challenge, indeed to hold its leader to the highest standards of probity.
Recent reports suggest there are some, within the MDC-T, who are planning to challenge Tsvangirai, but few dare come out in the open. Their greatest fear is the MDC-T rank and file, a politically-bankrupt class that celebrates failure, honours it even.
Tsvangirai has failed to dislodge President Mugabe on three occasions, and Zanu-PF on four. By all accounts, he is determined — if his party would let him — to fight a fourth election, a clearly doomed campaign which will come to grief.
What the MDC-T leaders, and their politically-unsophisticated base, fail to realise is that Tsvangirai does not have a better case to lead the MDC-T than the next man. He has not won, on three occasions, and so is no better than the next guy who fancies a shot at the presidency.
With his sex scandals, accusations of nepotism and dictatorship, political impotence and shut mind — as his critics suggest — Tsvangirai should have long been removed from his accidental pedestal, if the MDC-T was a functional organisation which means half of what its slogans say.
The fact that Tsvangirai remains MDC-T leader, limping to sure defeat in 2018, is a damning indictment on the party as a whole, but especially the cowardly leaders that demand of the ruling Zanu-PF party what they dare not with their organisation.
It is now too late to expect Tsvangirai to stand aside, without a nudge. But it’s quite early in the national political calendar for the MDC-T party to find a credible leader who will steer the national discourse back to the issues affecting Zimbabweans, and away from Tsvangirai’s loose zip.
Online Reporter