By Jealousy Mawarire | I want to thank our supporters who voted for our candidate Kudakwashe Gopo. Bikita west, as we said just before the nomination court sat, was some form of practice match where the result was not as important as the SWOT analysis that will come out of it.

There are key issues that come out of the by-election that we are going to use in the elections strategy that we are putting in place as a party. But if you want to extrapolate the results and apply them to the whole country, to say that will be the number of votes we are going to get in the 210 constituencies in 2018, then you will realise that the 2453 votes by Gopo will translate to 515 130 votes nationally ,which is 24 percent of the total votes polled by Mugabe in 2013. If you subtract the 24 percent from 61 percent that Mugabe got you will realise that he would fall short of the 50 percent plus one vote needed for one to be declared President.

Assuming all the people who voted for Gopo are former Zanu-PF, which is possible, it makes a compelling argument that a coalition of opposition forces can dislodge Zanu-PF since Mujuru eats into the Zanu-PF vote to the benefit of opposition forces. The other compelling argument is that the 2453 votes that ZimPF polled, which can be generalised to 515 130 votes nationally, is a big figure to start with. It gives us a springboard from which to grow our support base in the next 17 months heading towards the 2018 harmonised elections.

Coca cola, which is now a generic name for all soft drinks in Zimbabwe, sold only 9 drinks per day at its inception compared to 1.9 billion drinks it is selling daily now. Everything has a starting point and Bikita, for us, is a very good starting point, good enough to inspire us to do better. Even the second Chimurenga had a far worse start than how we have started this war that we have waged to topple Zanu-PF starting from Bikita. The nationalists lost all the 7 freedom fighters at the battle of Chinhoyi in 1966 but rather than dampen the spirits of the nationalists, the Chinhoyi setback provided the inspiration to plan better, recruit more fighters and invest into understanding the enemy more.

What happened after that, as they say, is history. Yes Bikita could be a set back to some but to us, it is a positive event for which we are thanking our supporters who came out to support our candidate. We have polling stations where we won, we will use these to understand what we did well and where we lost we will invest in understanding why. Overall Bikita strengthens rather than weakens us.