By Patrick Guramatunhu| “Rinemanyanga hariputirwi!” (The truth will always come out no matter how much one tries to conceal it!) so goes the Shona adage. After 20 years of blundering from pillar to post the truth is now coming that MDC is a party of breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent individuals.
“Exclude me, I did not participate in that nonsense (support of the November 2017 coup). Firstly, being a scholar of history not as a lawyer alone, knowing well that where the military has taken a leading role in the changing of government, nowhere in Africa have soldiers led a democratic change,” remarked Job Sikhala, MDC Alliance deputy national chairperson.
“We knew we were going through a military coup and a military coup would only be supported by those people who did not have the eyes to see that we are being taken into a trap of a worse dictatorship.”
It is interesting to note here that most MDC Alliance leaders including the late Morgan Tsvangirai and the current party leader Nelson Chamisa publicly and unreservedly supported the military coup. Of course, Sihkala is right; supporting the November 2017 coup was foolish because the coup was never going to bring about any meaningful democratic changes as events have since shown.
What was the blind as a mole MDC leaders hoping to achieve, one might well ask.
Chamisa and Tsvangirai said they supported the coup because Mnangagwa, through his emissaries, had promised to replace the Mugabe regime with a National Transition Authority (NTA), in which MDC was to play a role, and to postpone the upcoming 2018 elections. The elections due in July 2018, were to be postponed to allow the NTA to implement the democratic reforms to ensure free, fair and credible elections, MDC argued.
We all know that MDC leaders had failed to get even one reform implemented during the 2008 to 2013 GNU. Mugabe had bribed them with the trappings of high office, ministerial limos, very generous salaries and allowances, a US$4 million mansion for Tsvangirai, etc., etc. With their snouts in the feeding trough; MDC leaders completely forgot about implementing the reforms.
MDC leaders failed to implement even one reform in five years. Not even one!
“We got in the inclusive government and just sat there, spent five years in there. We came out without doing anything,” Nelson Chamisa admitted in July this year.
Of course, Tsvangirai and company were going to get the same royal treatment of ministerial limos, generous salaries, etc. in the proposed NTA. One has to be really naive to believe the NTA would have implemented any meaningful reforms; Tsvangirai et al would have, once again, sat there, eat and did nothing else.
Indeed, if MDC leaders were truly interested in making sure the reforms were implemented BEFORE the elections, then why did the party participate in the 2018 elections knowing fully well that Mnangagwa had not implemented even one reform?
Chamisa has often commented on how Tsvangirai “died a bitter man” because Mnangagwa did not keep his NTA promise. Even with the benefit of hindsight of the broken promise to have NTA and the broken promise of holding free, fair and credible July 2018 elections; he still fails to see the folly of having trusted the Zanu PF dictatorship to deliver democratic change.
Indeed, even now, MDC is still fighting for the NTA as a way out of the country’s worsening economic and political mess. Even now, with millions of Zimbabweans living in abject poverty, with all basic services such as supply of clean water and health care all but collapse and the nation at the edge of edge of the precipitous abyss, all MDC leaders care about is another chance to sit, eat and do nothing!
Job Sikhala is spot on Mnangagwa has indeed “taken (the nation) into a trap of a worse (than the Mugabe) dictatorship” and MDC leaders too corrupt and incompetent to even see it! And to make matters worse, there are many Zimbabweans out there who still continue to trust MDC leaders to deliver free and fair elections and follow them blindly like sheep to the slaughter.