By Dr Masimba Mavaza| MDC has an engine running twenty four hours. This is the engine of scheming and plotting.
As the establishment’s need to keep Mwonzora and all the senior folks away from power has grown more urgent and desperate, so has the nature of the attacks which has become physical and brutal. The debacle exposes MDC shenanigans and under hand operations in the MDC.
Ideologically Mwonzora was resolutely against the thrust of four decades of a turbo-charged neoliberal capitalism and sanctions. Mwonzora practices mature politics while Chamisa surrounded himself with those who advocate for student politics. The radicalism in Chamisa was a clashing point with the conservative veterans in the MDC. Chamisa failed to mature fast; he could not move from student politics to national politics.
His marriage with Job and Biti stinks to the the high places. He surrounded himself with inexperienced over excited morons who can not appeal to the seasoned mature politicians like Mwonzora, Komichi and Mudzuri. So Mwonzora, Mudzuri and Komichi were singled out for expulsion. All what had to be done was wait for the opportune moment. So two distinctive factions emerged within MDC.
Chamisa had the support of Biti and Job Sikhala both Biti and Sikhala are political prostitutes who left MDC after sharp differences with Tsvangirai. Tsvangirai had to resort to violence which helped him to fire Biti and Mangoma. Job had left earlier to form MDC 99. Their rebellious behaviour did not sit well with Mwonzora hence the friction.
Mwonzora was not kin to have Biti back in the big tent.
In the latest of the interminable media “furores” about Mwonzora dating ZANU PF supposed unfitness to lead MDC it is easy to forget where we were shortly before Mwonzora became a target for cleansing. He had won the support of an overwhelming majority of MDC members to head the party’s secretariat department a position he beat Chamisa to.
In the preceding years, it was hard to contain Mwonzora whose influence was too much for Chamisa to handle. Mwonzora had reinvented himself, after years of battling rebellious attitude which Chamisa and his inner circle were introducing in the party , as a spiritual guru-cum-political revolutionary in the MDC Mwonzora gained the hatred of the youthful overzealous group then hamisa group backed by the NEC and by the vanguard.
Chamisa employed all dirty tactics to soil Mwonzora and all those who represented the old MDC guards. The recalling of Biti and Welshman NCUBE Sikhala and the crew was to see the final takeover of the MDC by Chamisa.
The senior Adviser to Chamisa, Tendai Biti does not hide his dislike of Mwonzora and he has put much pressure to have him removed from the party. It is not a secret that Biti is a schemer and he has his eyes on the throne. If he removes those he sees as obstacles it will be easy for him to elbow chamisa out. Biti is fully aware that Chamisa commands the support of the majority supporters so he is playing his cards carefully.
Biti’s fast-talking, plain-speaking criticism of the existing political order, calling it discredited, unaccountable and unrepresentative, was greeted with smirking condescension by the political and media establishment. Nonetheless, in an era before Chamisa had become president of the party which is not a party, the media were happy to indulge him for a while, seemingly believing he or his ideas might prove a ratings winner with younger audiences.
But Chamisa started to look rather more impressive than anyone could have imagined. He took on supposed party heavyweights like Mudzuri Mwonzora and Orbert Gutu he charmed and shamed them into submission – both with his compassion and his thoughtful radicalism. Even in the gladiatorial-style battle of wits he made these titans of the political world look mediocre, shallow and out of touch. He was quick to connect any descending voice with ZANU PF. With Chamisa anyone who does not support him is ZANU PF or CIO.
Rumours of these head-to-heads allegations against the old guard went viral, and Chamisa fooled and won hundreds of thousands of new followers who are youthful.
Then he overstepped the mark and assumed the dictatorial tendencies. Chamisa is a product of illegality so anything legal in his party he fights it with all his heart.
Instead of simply criticising the political system, Chamisa argued that it was in fact so rigged by the powerful, by corporate interests, that party democracy had become a charade. Elections were pointless. Our votes were simply a fig-leaf, concealing the fact that our political leaders were there to represent not us but the interests of globe-spanning corporations.
Political and media elites had been captured by unshored corporate money. Our voices had become irrelevant.
Mwonzora didn’t just talk the talk. He started committing to direct action. Mwonzora’s revolutionary words had turned into revolutionary action
But just as Chamisa’s rejection of the old politics began to articulate a wider mood, it was stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court. After Chamisa was unexpectedly elevated to the party presidency offering for the first time in living memory a politics that did not listen to people before money, his style of rejectionism looked a little too cynical, or at least premature.
While Chamisa’s illegal victory marked a sea-change, it is worth recalling, however, that it occurred only because of a mistake. Or perhaps two.
First, a handful of NEC members agreed to nominate Chamisa for the leadership contest, scraping him past the threshold needed to get on the throne without procedures.
Most backed him only because they wanted to give the impression of an election that was fair and open. After his victory, some loudly regretted having assisted him. None had thought a representative of the tiny and besieged left wing of the parliamentary party stood a chance of winning – not after ED and his acolytes had spent more than two years remaking ZANU PF using their own version of entryism to eradicate any vestiges of socialism in the party.
Chamisa had very different ideas from most of his colleagues. Over the years he had broken with the consensus of the dominant Tsvangirai faction time and again consistently taking a minority view that later proved to be on the right side of history.
He alone among the leadership contenders spoke unequivocally against unity with ZANU PF regarding it as a way to leech away more public money to enrich the corporations and banks that had already pocketed vast sums from the public coffers – so much so that by 2018 they had nearly bankrupted the entire economic system.
And second, Chamisa won because of a recent change in the party’s rulebook – one now much regretted by party managers. The members, unlike the party machine, wanted Chamisa
Even the best designed systems have flaws, especially when the maintenance of the system’s image as benevolent is considered vitally important. It wasn’t that Chamisa’s ascendency had shown MDC’s political system was flawed and unaccountable. It was simply evidence that corporate power had made itself vulnerable to a potential accident by preferring to work out of sight, in the shadows, to maintain the illusion of democracy. Chamisa was that accident.
‘Brainwashing under freedom’
Chamisa’s success also wasn’t evidence that the power structure he challenged had weakened. The system was still in place and it still had a chokehold on the political and media establishments that exist to uphold its interests. Which is why it has been mobilising these forces endlessly to damage Mwonzora and team and avert the risk of a further, even more disastrous “accident”, such as his becoming Zimbabwean President. ..
Listing the ways the media have sought to undermine Mwonzora would sound preposterous to anyone not deeply immersed in these media-constructed narratives. But almost all of us have been exposed to this kind of “brainwashing under freedom” since birth.
The initial attacks on Mwonzora were for being poorly dressed, sexist, unstatesmanlike, a security threat, a ZANU PF spy – relentless, unsubstantiated smears the like of which no other party leader had ever faced. But over time the allegations became even more outrageously propagandistic as the campaign to undermine him intensified with Welshman Ncube Biti and Sikhala forming a force behind Chamisa aimed at Mwonzora.
As the establishment’s need to keep him away from power has grown more urgent and desperate so has the nature of the attacks.
It was difficult to attack Mwonzora directly for these positions. There was the danger that he might prove popular with voters. But Mwonzora was seen to have an Achilles’ heel. He was a life-long anti Mugabe activist and well known for his support for the rights of the long-suffering Zimbabweans. He was soon being presented as a leader happy to preside over an “institutionally” ZANU PF party.
The bad faith of the Mwonzora ZANU PF smears were particularly clear.
MDC has been typical in mischaracterising Mwonzora’s remarks not once but each time it has covered developments in his case.
That system is not impregnable, however.
As long as we colluded in the manufactured consensus of tyrant the system operated without challenge or meaningful dissent. A deeply ideological system destroying democracy was treated as if it was natural, immutable, the summit of human progress, the end of history. Those times are over. Accidents like Chamisa will happen more frequently, as will extreme climate events and economic crises.
The power structures in place to prevent such accidents will by necessity grow more ham-fisted, more belligerent, less concealed to get their way. And we might finally understand that a system designed to pacify many while a few grow rich at the expense of our children’s future and our own does not have to continue. That we can raise our voices and loudly say: “No!” The plot against Mwonzora shows that MDC can not be trusted with our nation. Too much underhand activities. The party is being run mafia style and Biti Sikhala and professor Ncube are vampires waiting to swallow our democracy. The interest Zimbabwe should have in MDC affairs is vested in the fact that our heroes fought for Democracy and died for democracy. It therefore pains them to sit and see a dictator being created under our nose.