By Nomusa Garikai- “Hupenzi inyama yegakava!” (There is no one more stubborn than a village idiot!) so goes the Shona maxim. The MDC leaders are village idiots and they are very stubborn too.

“On the 31st of July 2018, Zimbabweans overwhelmingly voted for President Nelson Chamisa. That election was stolen in broad daylight and since then, the crisis of legitimacy has manifested itself through multi-layered challenges that have manifested themselves through power outages, water and fuel shortages, indecent wages, high prices and the erosion of the people’s dignity, among other challenges,” said the MDC statement at the start of the ongoing public demonstration to force Mnangagwa to step down in favour of Nelson Chamisa.

We now hear that Chamisa is setting off seek international community support that he should be declared the winner of last’s elections.

“The [MDC] president is open and has plans to travel to major international centers, including Moscow and Beijing, some capitals in Europe and the West just to highlight the extent of the problem in terms of how the problem is man-made and how the problem is costing millions of lives and has threatened food security for millions of people,” said Dr Nkululeko Sibanda, Chamisa’s spokesperson.

Many people have explained to MDC leaders that the party’s half-way house position regarding last year’s elections is a lead balloon that will never fly. The one camp comprising the EU, Americans, Commonwealth and many others have totally rejected the election process and results as a farced. “The electoral commission lacked full independence and appeared to not always act in an impartial manner,” stated the EU Election Mission final report.

“The final results as announced by the Electoral Commission contained numerous errors and lacked adequate traceability, transparency and verifiability. Finally, the restrictions on political freedoms, the excessive use of force by security forces and abuses of human rights in the post-election period undermined the corresponding positive aspects during the pre-election campaign. As such, many aspects of the 2018 elections in Zimbabwe failed to meet international standards.”

So, anyone in Europe, America, etc. would once again ask MDC to produce the verified voters roll, all the V11 forms (summary of the vote count at each polling station), etc. ZEC and MDC failed to produce any of these key documents last year and hence the talk of failing to verify and trace results in the EU report quoted above.

The Chinese, Russians, SADC, AU and many others have accepted the election process as free, fair and credible. Whilst they accept the possibility of the individual presidential result being wrong, they accept that the Constitutional Court was competent to decide on than dispute. They reject Chamisa’s questioning of the Constitutional Court’s integrity when he failed to do the same with ZEC, the Court’s sister judiciary body.

So, either camp in the rigged election debate will find Chamisa guilty of cherry picking and therefore would never want to support him. No one is going to stop Chamisa visiting China, Russian, Europe he has visited a number of African countries already but he can be certain that no nation or organisation worth the spit will even endorse his claim as the winner of last year’s elections.

Indeed, as far as many countries in the West are concerned Chamisa and his MDC friends lost political credibility by participating in such blatantly fraudulent elections. For MDC to still claim to have won the elections after the party had seen the damning reports of the elections from the EU, Americans, Commonwealth and many others goes to show just how naïve and foolish the MDC leaders are!

Chamisa is off on a globe-trotting tour to drum up support to be declared winner of the 2018 presidential race. I will eat my hat if any national leader of note ever support such nonsense!