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Dumisani Sibanda
ZIMBABWE has a plethora of political parties, some so small that they would be defeated in an election if just one clan decided to form a political outfit.
There are 20 plus political parties — some dormant while others are active — thanks to the advances in information technology — only on social media — without voters who go to the polling stations to cast the ballot.
Other political parties — like Egypt Munenzwa’s political outfit — only spring into life — if their existence may be called that — two months before a national election and provide news material for comic stories to dilute the tense election environment and then receive their perennial drubbing before going into hibernation. But Zimbabwe being a multi-party democracy has to live with that.
However, despite these numerous parties on Zimbabwe’s political landscape is there a party which can wake up tomorrow if there was to be an election and dislodge Zanu PF from the throne? We are told by the MDC-T — which is the biggest of the opposition in Parliament — that their president Morgan Tsvangirai is a “mega brand and the face of the opposition”, one might add figuratively instead “an ugly one (face)” if the well documented political blunders he commits are anything to go by.
The Movement for Democratic Change as it was originally constituted has been faced with a myriad of problems some of them stemming from a lack of a plausible ideology as a rallying point as it was created as an amorphous body with people with disparate interests connected by the threadbare link of the “Mugabe Must Go” mantra.
That opposition anthem has with time dropped on the political music charts and seen the group disintegrating like amoeba.
Even the movement’s handlers in the regime change agenda, the United States government who have been sponsoring it are becoming weary with its perennial electoral losses and the chaos in the opposition party.
The party was formed at the height of anti-Government protests by Zimbabweans who were feeling the pinch of the Bretton Woods prescribed neo-liberal policies in the form of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes (Esap) forced on developing countries. During that era others even re-christened the Esap acronym representing Economic Structural Adjustment Programme to be Extended Suffering for African People to voice their concerns with the programme.
Zanu-PF with its mass orientation listened to the people and “buried” the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme.
It opted instead to take care of the needs of the masses by initiating the Land Reform Programme and economic indigenisation which sought to empower the black majority which act was a threat to the United States and Britain — Zimbabwe’s former coloniser in their neo-liberal agenda hence the political onslaught they launched on Harare.
By so doing, Zanu-PF pulled the rug under the MDC feet as the opposition party failed to ride on the crest of the wave of protests and instead has been plagued by numerous problems including — ironically — the lack of internal democracy as dissent within the political movement is now the order of the day.
As a result of the lack of democracy within the “democratic movement”, we have seen cups and saucers flying as various “kitchen cabinets” break away to build their own little homes much to the chagrin of their United States sponsors who have failed to hide their undiplomatic meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation, Zimbabwe.
The US Deputy Assistant State Secretary, Dr Shannon Smith — who visited Zimbabwe to assess their project painted a dismal picture of the opposition — telling Washington that the Movement for Democratic Change was disintegrating.
“It’s a fact and on record now that the opposition has been splintering,” Dr Smith is quoted as having said. “The Movement for Democratic Change now has multiple Movements for Democratic Change within it under separate leadership. Some of that is about differences of opinion, differences of leadership but I think that what is happening is that there is no unifying message at the moment that stretches across these parties.”
So true is the statement by Dr Smith that even just a look into the opposition theatrics which are turning to be comic will reveal that they individually accept that in their present state where they are in sixes and sevens they cannot upstage Zanu-PF in an electoral contest and are now toying with the idea of forming a coalition.
In a paper that the MDC-T spokesman, Mr Obert Gutu, presented at a Mass Public Opinion Institute seminar in Harare towards the end of last year, he makes it crystal clear that at times coalitions are formed when “opposition parties themselves are weak”.
With talk of a coalition one would expect there is a meeting of minds but just bringing up the subject shows how irreconcilable their differences are. Clearly, they are miles apart.
So infantile are some of the arguments or pronouncements on the subject that one is tempted to say “Never in a thousand years will the opposition group under one grand coalition that will dethrone Zanu-PF”.
Obviously the above statement is a play on the unfounded one made by the Rhodesian colonialist Ian Douglas Smith’s “Never in a thousand years will Rhodesia have black rule” but the difference being with the coalition issue, one is unlikely — as things stand — to be forced to eat their words like Smith did.
With two years before the next elections, the opposition parties are revelling and wasting time in kindergarten debates about a ball belonging to a creche “being mine” instead of getting on with the game at the pre-school.
The MDC-T has obviously been grandstanding — using its position of being the better loser among hopeless losers — as the convener of the Grand Coalition — but Jacob Mafume — the spokesman of “new kid on the block” — a breakaway from MDC-T People’s Democratic Party will have none of that.
“(Tsvangirai) should come with an open mind otherwise he is leading himself to nowhere,” the youthful Mafume was recently quoted by the Herald as saying. “We were the first to come up with the idea of forming a grand coalition.”
If a party is going to concern itself about who should be given credit for coming up with the idea of forming a coalition then one can see a titanic battle in the coalescing parties on bigger issues like who will lead such a formation.
Infact Mr Mafume adds: “We have said we should form a coalition but we should first agree on who leads it”.
The MDC-T spokesman, Gutu fired the warning shots on that aspect of the power dynamics of such a coalition — which for now is a mirage — in his treatise on coalitions when he said : “There are also issues to do with egos. You can have some otherwise lightweight political figures with inflated egos who might want to punch above their weight.”
Gutu adds, certain “parties and individuals are bigger than others”.
But blogger and political analyst Takura Zhangazha warns that: “unless they (opposition parties) shift from their current politics of entitlement, internal autocracy, perpetual splits and monopolisation of leadership”, they should not entertain the idea of a grand coalition.
Gutu adds that a coalition is formed when parties believe they have a “common enemy”, in other words the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
But the MDC-T spokesman also admits that without a cross cutting ideology — a “central message” to borrow the phrase by Dr Smith’s — that forms the rallying point, any coalition is doomed to fail.
In his words, Gutu says: a coalition is only possible when “the opposition parties share the same ideology, vision and mission”.
Ironically, even those in the opposition agree that they should go beyond the ”Mugabe must go” mantra if they are to be taken seriously by the electorate.
They go to the extent of pointing out that if the idea of a coalition of opposition parties led by MDC-T is so they can join the choir singing the opposition anthem “Mugabe must go”, which has largely failed to resonate with the electorate, then they should be counted out.
Addressing the Bulawayo Press Club in October last year, the leader of the MDC, Professor Welshman Ncube, berated his opposition colleagues for “too much obsession with removing Mugabe” yet “there is no programme of action afterwards”.
“I believe if all that binds us is to defeat (Cde) Mugabe that coalition won’t survive,” Ncube- who is the former secretary-general of the united MDC is quoted as having said.
The spokesman of the MDC, Kurauone Chihwayi, also harped a similar tune in a recent Herald story but revealed the power dynamics that make the MDC-T-led coalition impossible.
“We agree to the idea of a coalition and our door is still open to likeminded democrats or political organisations,” said Chihwayi.
Paradoxically, in the clearest evidence that there is no love lost between the two MDCs, Chihwayi takes aim at Tsvangirai as he mischievously adds: “We are talking about non-violent parties, non-corrupt political parties whose leaders don’t have bed hopping credentials.” Part of the reasons that led Ncube and his colleagues to leave “Tsvangirai’s kitchen cabinet” was violence within the party and there is no prize for guessing who is the target of the “bed hopping credentials” jibe.
The MDC-T leader’s matrimonial problems since the tragic loss of his wife in a road accident are well documented as he tried to find a partner. It is not only the Ncube outfit which has misgivings on the coalition project as presented by Tsvangirai’s MDC but even the National Constitutional Assembly led by Professor Lovemore Madhuku.
“. . . if that coalition is about removing Mugabe, we can’t be part of it. Removing Mugabe is not an economic policy,” Prof Madhuku was quoted by the Herald as having said.
It is instructive to note that even the MDC-T — which has gone on about the idea of the party being a “big tent” which presents a sense of a “short time thing” since it talks of a “tent” which is not a permanent structure — concedes that when you hear political players mooting the idea of pitching a “big tent” to house a coalition it is an admission that they have failed to “single handedly” remove the ruling party from power. But when all is said and done as things stand, “it will be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle” than opposition parties forming a grand coalition to de-throne President Mugabe and Zanu-PF.
Bongani Ndlovu