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Chronicle Reporter
MORGAN Tsvangirai “must give a state of his bedroom address” and stop dreaming of a second unity government, a top Zanu-PF official said last night. Tsvangirai spoke to supporters and foreign diplomats at a Harare hotel last Friday in what his party dubbed a “State of the Nation Address”.
He claimed that “the current parlous state of the economy is the true result of that stolen election”, before going on to state that “the solution is unconditional dialogue”.
“Faced with a similar crisis in 2008, we engaged in dialogue and we carved out a home-grown solution to the problems bedevilling our country,” Tsvangirai said, referring to a coalition government with Zanu-PF and the MDC.
“There is no substitute for dialogue. As MDC, we believe that a meeting of stakeholders from different backgrounds would be a positive start.”
The MDC-T leader also desperately tried to steer the debate away from his marital problems, insisting that “the personal circumstances of individuals, whatever their status in society, pale into insignificance compared with the hardships facing Zimbabweans.”
Zanu-PF politburo member and Information Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo told Chronicle in an interview yesterday that Tsvangirai “said a lot of things which are far removed from reality, including that Zanu-PF needs his party to run government and turn around the economy, or alternatively that there must be an election now.”
Prof Moyo said: “The main points of his purported state of nation address were two-fold: one, that his party should come back into government ostensibly because Zanu-PF needs it, and two if Zanu-PF doesn’t agree it needs his party there should be election now.
“These two things can’t be the state of the nation by any stretch of the nation. You can only give an address about something you are pre-occupied with and thinking about every day, exercising your mind and being seen to be hands on with it.
“Clearly, Tsvangirai has not been hands on with national affairs, he can’t give a State of the Nation address, but he can give a state of his bedroom address. We would all be ears, with the goings on there it seems more fascinating.”
Tsvangirai’s wife, Elizabeth Macheka, recently walked out on him barely six months after their wedding. She said Tsvangirai could not “get it up”, and accused him of trying to marry his late wife’s sister.
“With all the dysfunctional things around him, let Tsvangirai give a state of his bedroom address, but let him not pretend to be giving a State of the Nation. There is a big difference between the state and his bedroom,” Prof Moyo added.
Prof Moyo said demands by the MDC-T’s deputy treasurer general Elton Mangoma that Tsvangirai should step down were “instructive”, adding: “Everybody knows that Tsvangirai has nothing to say about the state of the nation, even his own key advisers such as Mangoma say they don’t know how Tsvangirai will resolve the state of his bedroom which would qualify him to give a state of the nation address.”
“It’s not only his advisors telling him to leave the country alone, but also his party. What is the basis of his so-called state of the nation?”
Tsvangirai would be best advised, said Prof Moyo, not to mistake his own party’s leadership crisis with a leadership vacuum in the country.
“Elections are held when they are constitutionally due. Problems in personal lives or parties are not grounds for holding elections.
“The party that is elected is expected to attend to attend to issues such as the economy. That is not done in six months, that is why the term is five years,” he added.
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