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The decision by the 130 CCC Parliamentary legislators, the 103 members of the House of the Assembly who take the party whip plus the 27 senators, to boycott the formal opening of the First Session of the Tenth Parliament beggars belief.
It appears they did not wish to be in the same chamber as President Mnangagwa, who is bound by law to summon Parliament each year and then in the official opening explain why he needed Parliament to meet and what legislation the Government is intending to introduce for consideration, debate, amendment and action.
It seems exceptionally dubious to assume that all 130 boycotters believe the delusion that President Mnangagwa lost the election and that Nelson Chamisa won a majority of the votes cast.
There might be a few CCC legislators who have the same hallucinations as their party leader, but most surely recognise the results are the results, even if they wanted a different outcome.
It appears, from reports, that Nelson Chamisa ordered his party’s team to skip the opening session to show their solidarity with his hallucination that he obtained 51 percent of the vote.
At the moment we do not know if the MPs and senators will return for normal business when Parliament resumes sitting, or if the CCC members of the critical Parliamentary committees will attend those meetings.
Perhaps the party is prepared to live with a one-party Parliament until there is a large batch of by-elections after the present 130 lose their seats for skipping too many sitting days.
This would open doors for Zanu PF, but more likely an opposition party prepared to get stuck in and see what laws they can support and what laws they want changed is likely to occupy a large batch of the present CCC seats.
The Speaker, Advocate Jacob Mudenda initiated low-key action against the 130, simply refusing to distribute their fuel coupons to drive themselves home and to reclaim their hotel bills from their pay.
He could have gone a lot further since accepting allowances, such as free fuel and hotel accommodation, for something you have no intention of using for its designed purpose, attending the opening of Parliament, could even be the start of a corruption-related fraud investigation.
There are precedents from outside Parliament for misusing allowances, as those who claim education allowances for non-existent children are finding as anti-corruption enforcers move in.
In any case it is unlikely that many CCC supporters will give their Parliamentarians much respect for snatching the benefits without doing anything to deliver. This sort of trip on a gravy train is something that most people oppose.
While Adv Mudenda’s measures will hit the pockets of the boycotting Parliamentarians from outside Harare, those who represent the constituencies in Harare Metropolitan, or are the provincial members of the National Assembly and Senate from that province, plus a handful of National Assembly members from the border regions of Mashonaland East and West, almost certainly did not get a hotel room and may not have had much in the way of a fuel allowance. Some other sanction might well be required for that lot.
In the larger scale of things a large minority of voters are not represented in Parliament at the moment, both those who voted for the boycotting Parliamentarians and those who did not, but still fall within the constituencies and provinces they represent.
The worse off may be the population of Bulawayo, who are at present represented by a single woman’s quota MP and a single senator. They have a voice in Parliament, but there are limits to what one person in each House can do.
According to the reports the 130 were threatened that if they did not follow the deluded instructions of their party leader, they would lose their seats when that leader wrote to the Speaker of the National Assembly and the president of the Senate to tell them these 130 no longer represented the party.
By law the presiding officers would then have to ask the 130 to withdraw as their seats were vacant and President Mnangagwa, on being informed that the seats were vacant, would be obliged to call by-elections in the affected constituencies, while the vacant proportionately elected seats in both Houses would be filled after the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission called upon the CCC to nominate replacements of the right gender and age.
The impasse on Tuesday highlights the fact that the CCC is not a properly organised political party, rather just an informal group of recycled opposition politicians revolving around a leader who has a very high regard for his own position, even going as far as using his portrait as a party logo and making unilateral decisions for the Parliamentarians who won their elections while he lost his bid.
Perhaps the large CCC Parliamentary caucus will show they have the sort of guts they are supposed to have and fix the organisational structure so that the party resembles a real party, rather than a one man show by someone who continually loses elections, both at national level and within the parties he has belonged to in the past. But perhaps they are just scared.
That does open the door to a real political party with a proper structure and owned by its supporters, rather than its leader, who can enter Parliament and represent those who want an alternative.
What is angering a lot of those who are represented by this CCC caucus in Parliament is that they are not properly represented at the moment, although their representative seems quite willing to drive to Parliament on Government fuel, stay in a hotel at Government expense, and, if past experience from the Ninth Parliament is any guide, is quite willing to take up the loans and tax rebates to buy a car.
Plus, they almost certainly want to see their salary and allowances every month pour into the bank account.
Online Reporter