Andrew
The recent rebranding of Chamisa’s faction of the Movement for Democratic Change to three Cs, Citizen’s Coalition for Change, amounts to nothing more than an attempted resale of age-old neo-colonial project through enticing visuals.
Historically, “colour revolutions” were sponsored and launched by the West in post-Soviet era, to colour a false brave new world which the seemingly triumphant West thought it could manufacture and sell the world.
Western sponsored anti-establishment movements mushroomed in Latin America and Asia. Their common DNA was the preponderance of colour over content; form, prop, presentation and personality over substance, policy, plan and programme. It is no wonder that both Presidents Putin and Xi of Russia and China respectively recently took a stance against this so-called “colour revolutions” across the world. Through Chamisa and his remade MDC faction, this same colour revolution has now washed up on Zimbabwe’s political shore.
All colour, sound and fury signifying nothing
Discerning Zimbabweans have not wasted time to notice. And also to find appropriately derisive epithets for laughing off those pretentious politics. The “nyaudzosingwi” (rhetorical flourish) and “haana plan” (he has no plan) verbal slap dealt Chamisa, including by his former colleague, Blessing Chebundo, are wholly apt, merited and characteristic of the utter contempt with which these politics have been received. Not helped by his twitter supporters whose only reposte to opposed, content-grounded arguments is a mere DOT.
A commentator recently quipped this DOT revolution amounted to frozen brains within opposition ranks. Chamisa himself admitted to this characteristic emptiness at his typically colourful Zimbabwe Grounds Rally. Many trawled in vain for direction and substance from him, only to meet a flashy dilettante or coxcomb of Dickensian “Bleak House” fame. What a way to behold the new, and to announce the arrival of a “newly” born!!
Yellow medium, message and noise.
At this inaugural rally all Chamisa delivered were boyish acrobatics and a garishly yellow slumber jacket. Colour was the sender, the medium, the message, the receiver and the noise, all rolled in one. Colour not in the Victorian colonial sense of skin pigmentation as a marker of racial worth and place in the social hierarchy. But colour as mere aesthetics, as decorative political proposition for mass distraction at a time of serious plebiscitary choice. Yes, colour to mask and prettify the empty and the ugly. And ugliness haunts Chamisa’s formation.
Bane more than boon
In history, the opposition’s feat of capturing virtually all the country’s municipalities since 2000, turned out more a bane than a boon. It was an ambiguous gain. Ambiguous in that it made the opposition a governing party at local, municipal level, while retaining it as a fracking opposition nationally. A doer and a critic all in one; a ruptured virgin, indeed an ageing sinner feigning righteousness of the unborn.
Probity deficit . . .
As a municipal governor, the opposition assumed the burden and responsibility to account to an angry ratepayer it poorly served and swindled. As a national opposition, it demanded the benefit of doubt, the impeccability of one who has never lived or governed! Today this ambiguity damns it. The incompetence and stupendous probity deficits it has delivered at gubernatorial level has turned our towns and cities into some all-round mess. By way of infrastructure, in service delivery terms, and by way of books of accounts it never writes at all, or cooks routinely. ZINARA funds-gate is illustrative. This appalling record at municipal level denies Chamisa the beauty of innocence he wishes for himself, and is claimed by opposition parties worldwide. The swindled voter cannot buy his claim to govern better than the ruling Zanu PF.
Ruling municipal party
Yet this bare fact is yet to registered on the mind of the youthful politician. Had it registered, he would have launched himself on anything but mere colour and histrionics. He would have known he faces an angry ratepayer who now demands a vision, a plan and a programme for alternative governance. And the word is ALTERNATIVE: not to Zanu PF or even the Rhodesia Front which Zanu PF toppled. But an alternative to himself, to his record since 2000 of messing up all municipalities in the country! If brutal truth be told, today and again in 2023, Chamisa runs against himself, against his appalling record as leader of a ‘ruling’ municipal party.
Zanu PF moves in to repair
And Zanu PF has wasted no time in nailing him. Not only has Zanu PF moved in to repair stupendous damages wrought by Chamisa from 2000 — wrought for over two decades; it has communicated this decadal mess as a peek into, and metaphor for, an unfortunate Zimbabwe under the colourful CCC!!!
Chamisa has no plan; only colour.
Chamisa has no worldview; only a finger gesture.
Opposing themselves
Much worse, Chamisa has no counterpoint to raise against charges he invited onto himself. To illustrate, I turn to my experience in debating him, his acolytes (he calls himself a messianic pastor!), his supporters and all those freelancing for his person (not cause, which he doesn’t have!) on the thoughtless Twitter platform. Quite often, they raise and post images of urban squalor and disrepair as evidence and props for attacking Zanu PF. Then you ask: so who dunnit? Only then does it dawn on them THEY DID! And they then either retreat from their boomerang props in ignominy. Or they just drop the legendary DOT of frozen intellect and reasoning-come-unstuck! Worse, they pile it all on Douglas Mwonzora, their bete noire! Mwonzora’s recall of their MPs and councillors has become a rescue to their decadal failures.
Save us from ourselves . . .
If all the above fail, they blame their myriad failures on Minister July Moyo who is in charge of Local Government!! Minister Moyo should have stopped us from swindling ratepayers, they lamely retort! Not only are they in denial and desperate for scapegoats; they wind up inadvertently conceding Zanu PF is the only fitting ruling Party which must oversee them, indeed restrain them from their venality. It can’t be worse! And as if to oblige, Minister July Moyo has since moved in to clean up the mess they wrought.
Yellow is no zeitgeist
A party readying itself to govern must be convincing. It must offer persuasive arguments, persuasive plans. It must make itself synonymous with national solutions and narratives. It must, in other words, create the zeitgeist — the defining mood and spirit of a particular period moulded by trending ideas, visions and arguments. Chamisa’s sickly yellow is no zeitgeist. Not even in the world of fashion! He lacks a marshalling argument. His supporters are all over, spectacularly arguing and running against themselves. And their leader!
Paying tribute to rival Zanu PF
As a launching political statement, Zimbabwe Grounds was an unmitigated disaster. Chamisa’s CCC ran a tweet that said the party would be launched at Zimbabwe Grounds, WHERE IT ALL BEGAN! What began at Zimbabwe Grounds in 1980! The story of Zimbabwe’s march to freedom through the watershed 1980 election which Zanu PF won resoundingly. Why would Chamisa do this to himself? This backhanded tribute to the rival Zanu PF party was quite baffling, even to us who work in the ruling party’s ideological kitchen. Why would Chamisa pay such glorious tribute to his rival? Chamisa cannot chant incantations that revive the ghost of 1980 without suffering self-relegation and irrelevance. After all, he was still in the womb while those he contests for power had survived and come back from a brutal war which gave birth to the Nation he now aspires to govern.
Having omelette without breaking egg
Two more gaffes compounded this monumental blunder. At Zimbabwe Grounds, Chamisa announced he NOW supported land reforms, even as he decried the methodology of those reforms. In claiming support for an end-state whose painful mechanism he opposed, he hoped to have an omelette without breaking the egg. But more damned him. His new position meant before Zimbabwe Grounds, he opposed Land Reforms! Which is to say he favoured occupation of Zimbabwe‘s Land by a colonial white landed aristocracy.
When Zanu PF forces
Chamisa’s hand
The question which he himself invited by that uncalled for, ill-fated disclosure was: what brought about this volte face? He left this enquiry an open-ended, thus giving Zanu PF the political license to fill the gap. And Zanu PF did: it was the sheer completeness, the sheer irreversibility and success of Zanu PF’s Land Reform Programme which had forced him to come to terms with a programme he opposed until now! Another ringing endorsement of Zanu PF as the only fitting ruling Party! I don’t need to remind you, gentle reader, that by raising and affirming Land Reforms, Chamisa was firmly orbiting in Zanu PF’s zeitgeist! Serious aspiring governors don’t react, even then 22 years later; they act and write a new, alternative script. In real time too!!!
Romancing Smith’s notorious DAs
I said two gaffes. Here is the second one. To communicate its changed position on Zanu PF’s Land Reform Policy, CCC produced a graphic of men in arms. The hope was to dock the party’s volte face in a milieu of armed militancy led and prosecuted by Zanu PF. He sought to engraft CCC on Zanu PF’s historical stem, unashamedly! Except the graphics used showed Ian Smith’s surrogate all-African askari army: the notorious DAs or District Assistants. Anyone old enough to have experienced the war immediately recoiled at this outrage from a party already facing charges of being a political project of white Rhodesia’s embittered landed gentry. Why would Chamisa’s ideologues get it so awfully wrong, and in a manner which validated charges of their Rhodesian political paternity and ancestry? Can a party which mischaracterises a Nation’s founding process ever be trusted to govern, let alone defend that Nation’s interest? Try and imagine the British Labour Party confusing Churchill’s army with that of Hitler!
Punching above his puny weight
Except there is a method to the ‘blunder’. How does the colour party and its leader fare on foreign affairs? Two instances suffice to demonstrate its emptiness. Ahead of the Zimbabwe Government, SADC and the African Union, Chamisa has pronounced himself on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He has come down firmly on the side of Ukraine and America-led NATO bloc. Sovereignty of Ukraine and all nations must be upheld, he opined, seemingly taking a laudable, commonsensical line.
Except the same NATO broke agreement done with the then Soviet Union by extending its sphere of influence eastwards, right up to Russia’s doorstep? Is NATO’s eastward extension about defending its sovereignty, or sheer expansionism and quest for total global dominance at Russia’s expense? Except the same NATO smashed Libya here on our African Continent, with only Russia and China coming to the defence of Libya’s sovereignty in the Security Council? Except the same America smashed Iraq under the flimsiest of pretexts; smashed Afghanistan; is smashing Syria; threatens Iran, North Korea and our Zimbabwe? Does he remember Blair and Bush came very close to smashing Zimbabwe, only for us to be defended by Russia and China in the Security Council? How had little Zimbabwe threatened the sovereignty or existential security of United Kingdom and United States? And this coming from the same politician who exhorted US to invade Zimbabwe in leaked WikiLeaks documents?
Wearing the West’s colour
A self-esteeming leader and statesman’s position on contemporary issues is informed by accurate history, competent reading of world affairs, and by national interest. It is never coloured by an overriding desire to ingratiate himself with foreign interests, least of all interests whose role and place in history subvert the very principle he pretends to espouse or defend, using an outlandish conflict when the home situation bears down so heavily.
We will see what colour Chamisa wears when Biden renews the Executive Order extending illegal sanctions against Zimbabwe. On that he doesn’t need a telescope that sees far. He is still to pronounce himself on most recent decision by the EU on sanctions against Zimbabwe.
Equally, we wait for the day Chamisa joins the President and SADC in condemning Islamic insurgency in Mozambique.
Winning through oppositions elsewhere
Chamisa is wont to foreseeing himself in Zimbabwe’s State House on the strength of ascension to power of opposition parties elsewhere in the region or even beyond. Malawi, and lately Zambia, come to mind. He even lauds Malema every now and then. Do all these foreign cases reveal any coherent worldview? Not at all. Just evanescent camaraderie founded on the episodic and anecdotal; in fact founded on a mistaken belief that an example elsewhere is an installing substitute for power-winning effort here and now!
Evanescent because changes in Malawi are expropriated by Chamisa’s CCC in the morning, only to be jettisoned and rejected before sunset. In the case of Zambia, Chamisa is thrown into confounding perplexity when Zanu PF and President Hichilema’s party go partying! Or when Uhuru supports Raila — his Raila — in Kenya, in the process showing how politics and foreign affairs scarcely suffer easy conclusions from a shallow politician hungry for a lifting precedent abroad. What better underscores nothing beyond colour than all this?
The DA he cannot be
South Africa is no less confounding. No sooner does Chamisa attempt to embrace Malema than he found Malema testifying against the very interests which fund his CCC. Equally, no sooner does he seek to distance himself from DA than he found DA’s place in governing echelons quite a damning illustration of what he cannot do by misgoverning municipalities. For DA has managed to use its control of municipalities in South Africa far better than Chamisa can ever hope to, given another 22 years in charge. Thank God, his grip on Zimbabwe’s municipalities begins to loosen, thanks to himself mostly, and Zanu PF’s recovery in urban constituencies.
Baffled Professor
I conclude by drawing the reader’s attention to two souls who cry for beloved Chamisa and his colour party. Foremost is Professor Jonathan Moyo, arguably the colour party’s half-hearted and seemingly part-time ideologue. He did a lot to provide ideas and even the name which CCC has become. But it appears he didn’t and won’t go far enough.
Quite the contrary, lately he seems plagued by key, unanswered questions concerning CCC. Jolted by Hopewell Chin’ono’s push for some dictatorial management of internal processes of CCC, the thoughtful Professor challenged CCC to spell out its character/ideology.
He asked: is CCC a Party or a Coalition? If it’s a party or coalition: is it Democratic Party or Coalition? If it’s neither of the above, is it something else? Which is? He also questioned the mobilising utility of the contractual term CITIZEN.
Frankly I never expected such elementary yet inescapable questions on self-definition from one so close to CCC’s founding processes and ideation. Yet they came, arguably indicating the degree of definitional crisis in the colour party.
One Kunambura asks
The second, equally mournful soul is less thoughtful but nevertheless representative. His name is Andrew Kunambura, Editor of New Zimbabwe. Recently, he penned an article titled Beyond the Colour Game. The article raises more or less the same issues, but with undisguised sympathy for Chamisa, and animus for Zanu PF. Again it’s interesting that so close and so firm a supporter in charge of an important online publication, is no less unclear, in fact bemused. Both commentators raise issues which garish yellow can never prettify.
I am only a village donkey that neighs!
Online Reporter