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Cuthbert Mavheko
When MDC-Alliance legislators walked out of Parliament recently as President Emmerson Mnangagwa was delivering his State of the Nation Address and officially opening the Second Session of the 9th Parliament of Zimbabwe, they had one sinister motive — to embarrass the Head of State and Government, whose legitimacy they dispute.
The legitimacy issue has divided the MDC-Alliance into antagonistic factions with some party officials pontificating that this is a political gimmick created by Nelson Chamisa to compel the Government to accommodate him and his clueless lieutenants in some form of Government of National Unity.
It is worth noting that when Zimbabwe held its watershed elections in 2018, it did so within the framework of the country’s laws, being guided and informed by the Sadc Principles and Guidelines Governing Elections as well as the African Union (AU) Declaration on Principles Governing Democratic Elections in Africa.
The democratic space created by the New Dispensation gave all political parties participating in the elections the leeway to campaign freely in any part of the country. Equally important to note is the fact that the electoral atmosphere that prevailed in the country before and during the elections was very peaceful and gave the different political parties a platform to discuss and debate competing ideas freely and openly.
On July 30, 2018, Zimbabweans went to the polls in their numbers and voted in a calm and peaceful manner. This was done with the eyes of the entire world fixed on the country and in the presence of legions of local and international observers, as well as journalists from far and wide.
While this was a tightly-contested electoral battle, it was Cde Mnangagwa and his party Zanu-PF who emerged victorious.
A subsequent court application by the MDC-Alliance challenging the results of the Presidential plebiscite culminated in the judgment of the Constitutional Court, which was delivered on 24 August 2018. The judgment, as everyone is aware, put the legitimacy issue to rest when it upheld the will of the electorate as expressed on July 30, 2018.
The Con-Court judgment proved conclusively that the election of Cde Mnangagwa as President of the Republic of Zimbabwe was above board and that issues of vote-rigging raised by Chamisa and his cronies in the MDC-Alliance were the mere theatrics of politicians who revel in negativity.
Chamisa and his people in the distressed MDC-Alliance ship must come out of cloud-cuckoo-land and accept that in any contest, political or otherwise, there are winners and losers.
President Mnangagwa and Zanu-PF won the 2018 harmonized elections resoundingly and it is thus incumbent upon all Zimbabweans to support them and move the country forward. We just cannot remain in election mode forever. We are all Zimbabweans and what unites us is more than what divides us.
Instead of whining as they are doing that the elections were rigged, the leadership of the MDC-Alliance should go back to the drawing board and start strategizing for the 2023 elections.
That said and done I must, however, point out that I don’t see the MDC-A’s political fortunes changing for the better in the forthcoming elections with Chamisa at the helm of the alliance.
It is this pen’s sober sense that Chamisa must now do the honorable thing; he must step down. He is a liability to the MDC-Alliance and has shown time and again that he lacks leadership qualities.
Simple common sense and logic dictates that anyone bidding to occupy the highest office in the land must be a credible person. His words must carry weight so that friends and foes alike take him seriously. In a nutshell, he must mean what he says.
The pertinent question to ask is this: Is Chamisa a trustworthy, honest and reliable person? Does he keep his promises, or is he a man of empty words? Sad for him, the latter is true of him.
A careful analysis of the speeches he made when he addressed his supporters, before and after the 2018 harmonized elections, shows that there was rarely cohesion between what he said and what he did. To be brutally frank, most of Chamisa’s utterances were hallucinatory, childish and detached from reality.
For starters, during the campaigning period for the said elections Chamisa told his supporters, and indeed the entire nation, that Zanu-PF was colluding with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) to rig the elections using Russian cyber experts.
He said he had all the rigging mechanisms in check and promised to expose all the irregularities. Some people believed him and waited with bated breath for the so-called irregularities to be unraveled.
However, Chamisa could not expose the ‘irregularities’ simply because they only existed in his fertile imagination and not in reality. Discerning analysts will, no doubt, agree with me that even before the results were announced, Chamisa had sensed that the scales of the presidential elections were tipped in favor of Cde Mnangagwa and he created the vote- rigging story as a face-saver.
This now leads us to the second reason why Chamisa must step down.
While addressing his supporters just before the harmonized elections, Chamisa said he would retire from politics if Cde Mnangagwa won the elections, even going to the extent of promising to give his 19 year-old sister to Zanu-PF presidential candidate, Cde Mnangagwa if he (Chamisa) lost the elections by 20 percent.
Some readers will say Chamisa was only joking. Yes, he may have been joking. However, let us not blind our eyes to the fact that this “joke” was discriminatory to women in general and exposed the MDC-A leader as a shameless misogynist.
Misogyny and sexism are ingrained in the DNA of Chamisa and his hardcore supporters. The sickening, sexualised and sexist abuse of Zec chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba and MDC leader Ms Thokozani Khupe by Chamisa’s fanatic loyalists before and after last year’s elections shows an alarming deterioration in the MDC-Alliance’s political culture.
Following the announcement of the results of the presidential elections, Chamisa held several press conferences where he told the entire world that he had won the presidential plebiscite by 56 percent.
He further stated that he had truck loads of evidence to prove that the elections had been rigged and would submit this evidence to the Constitutional Court. However, when a reporter asked him to expatiate on this “evidence” Chamisa skillfully skirted the issue, saying it was premature to avail this “evidence” to the media then.
It was therefore hardly surprising that the team of lawyers that represented Chamisa in the Constitutional Court soon found themselves in a Catch-22 situation as they did not have a shred of evidence to substantiate claims by their excitable client that the elections had been rigged.
Personally, I find it rather incomprehensible that Advocate Thabani Mpofu, arguably one of the best lawyers in the country, agreed to represent Chamisa in the Constitutional Court when he knew very well that the lawsuit could not be settled successfully without evidence.
I am not a lawyer, but what I do know with a degree of certainty is that in a court of law when a person is accused of theft or fraud, for instance, there must be evidence to effect a conviction.
Evidence is an integral component of the justice delivery system and every lawyer worth his/her salt knows this.
Alas, Chamisa’s glaring short-comings have shattered his personal integrity and credibility to shreds and made it virtually impossible for any reasonable person to take him seriously.
“Our party has paid a heavy price for Chamisa’s breathtaking naivety, incompetence and blundering. He should relinquish his position as party leader and surrender the reins to someone else,” said a top MDC-Alliance official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Parting shot: Chamisa might be a ‘brilliant’ lawyer, yes, but he has failed ignominiously as a politician. He should have the wisdom, discretion and courage to exit the political scene with the little dignity that he still has.
λ Cuthbert Mavheko is a freelance journalist living in Bulawayo. Contact details: Mobile 0773 963 448; e-mail [email protected]
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