How to lose an election

Back in the day when the country was being liberated, The Patriot reported that Morgan Tsvangirai found young women, poverty-stricken “komboni”, girls to be easy prey. Having a good job and earning good money apparently came with good perks. In their article, the nationalist weekly paper reported that witness accounts indicated that apart from being a well-to-do guy, Morgan also doubled as, to put it mildly, a low-level gangster complete with “soldiers”.
He reportedly ran a ring of wise guys, called Chola Boys, who were more than happy to do the donkey work.

They acted as look-outs and sometimes bait, but The Patriot says the biggest beneficiary of the sting operations was the former good ole Morgan, later rewarded the nickname “Hit-and-Run” for all his efforts.

He is said to have used his close association with white managers as an advantage, maintaining a sleek, charming personality that proved irresistible to the unsuspecting village folk.

He would lure his prey to a secluded mine football pitch, yet even then, his number one punch line was a promise of marriage.
This behaviour should have raised a major red flag but, regrettably, it did not.

Fast forward to 2009, after the unfortunate loss of his wife, the old Tsvangirai was unleashed, this time on a wider demographic range of women, all promised the marriage “Canaan”.

This time he was more cunning, using his power and influence to pick up women at airports.
In fact, his current wife was an “airport pick-up” from the Harare International Airport while the latest Mrs Tsvangirai was on her way to China on a business trip.
It was at another airport that he picked Locardia Tembo, whose brief marriage to him ended with tears and an out-of-court settlement.

The two were by no means the only players in this dramatic tragedy.
Arikana Chihombori, Aquilina Kayidza Pamberi, Leah Mhundwa and Loretta Nyathi, among others, were women thought to have been victim to the sex-crazed guy with a diplomatic passport.

So to say that an ill-judging national leader is dangerous would perhaps be an understatement.
Sure, sex scandals damage personalities of those involved.

But the apparent damage to a society by the very person the public look to for precedence is both a national concern and a very traumatic experience for the victims. Self-indulgence, as so publicly and brazenly displayed by the former prime minister, is like hitting a cricket ball against the spin — every odd is in favour of the opponent.

Following the full exposure of this erotic lifestyle, whispers quickly turned into loud grunts of disapproval. The Guardian, a UK-based newspaper, reported that Geoff Nyarota, the journalist apparently with political ambitions, encouraged Tsvangirai to “have regard for the dignity of his office”.

The local weekly, The Independent, was more direct in its expressions of disgust.
In its opinion piece on September 14 2012, as he was about to marry Elizabeth Macheka and as even juicer facts about Tsvangirai’s love life emerged, The Independent noted that “even without (Locardia) Tembo’s dramatic bid to stop the marriage to Macheka, Tsvangirai’s wedding was still going to be scandal-ridden, given how he was last year involved in a public row with the woman he ‘married’ for just about a fortnight before dumping her, citing all sorts of grounds, including shadowy interferences”.

Consequently, the paper questioned: “Will Tsvangirai survive this series of salacious sex scandals? If he does, is he fit to govern?”
Turned out, the answers to the two questions were NO and NO.

The Guardian newspaper noted that his multiple, and, apparently, simultaneous, sexual relationships with partners who appeared to have been subject to no vetting not only demonstrated his extremely poor judgment but also raised security concerns.

For women rights activists in particular and every self-respecting Zimbabwean in general, such conduct could not be acceptable and because it was open to scrutiny and widely reported, it should have been a wake-up call, but it was apparently not heeded by the Movement for Democratic Change.

Not only was a character sitting on top of an organisation with national structures seriously lacking leadership qualities and being suspected of being a front for western imperialism, he turned out to be on the borderline of sexual pervasiveness, so amateurish but egotistical that it is difficult to fully explain without a sociologist and a clinical psychologist.

His blips and blunders across the world, exposed to his Western “friends”, were a clear indication that he was not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Grace Mutandwa, a journalist and women rights activist, made the most sense and probably spoke on behalf of millions of Zimbabweans when she said: “We have heard of conspiracy theories here and there, but these things are known to happen. Yet surely, in the space of a year we have seen so many women that he has gone out with and abandoned. He now thinks that he is entitled to sleep around with women because he has power and money. It is disrespect towards women and he is setting the wrong example to society.”

Ultimately, his image changed from being a squeak- clean routinely-victimised president-in-waiting to the “creepy-looking rich guy always looking like he has gulped down a bucket of Viagra”.

To Tsvangirai, women were simply collateral damage in his insatiable thirst for sexual gratification.
One may argue that he is not the first and will not be the last, but this one is in a league of his own.

No one had ever done it so publically, and invited such tremendous fallout.
When The Guardian newspaper from the United Kingdom that once saw him as saviour of Zimbabwe says, “Tsvangirai has certainly been exposed as a self-indulgent and careless man”, the MDC-T should have realised that winning an election was going to be a long shot.

The Tsvangirai brand was falling apart, but his party’s top hierarchy persisted with the somewhat delusional arrogance, mistakenly assuming that voters were naïve enough to have blind allegiances as them.

New Zimbabwe, a UK-based web newspaper previously supportive of the opposition leader, wrote: “Tsvangirai lacks the moral authority necessary for a leader with his kind of ambition and aspirations to be president of his country”.

The electorate emphatically agreed.