By Felix Chiroro|FOR those of us who for close to twenty years witnessed Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai calling each other dictator and puppet of the West respectively, the 2018 elections offered a chance to move the nation into a new narrative.
When youthful Nelson Chamisa took over the MDC during the campaign period in February 2018, he carried on with the MDC confrontational approach to politics and even scaled up the tensions with ZANU-PF.
Morgan Tsvangirai had left the MDC at a point where we could feel he was more open to smoking a peace pipe with ZANU-PF than continue the draining confrontations which had not helped the MDC cause for so long.
Chamisa scuttled all that and went full throttle. It excited his suporters and even threw some of them into a trance. Words like murderers, thieves, old men in ZANU-PF, killers etc reappeared in the MDC campaign manual, if ever there was any manual to their campaign tactic.
At a rally at Chibuku in Chitungwiza in July 2018, Chamisa threw the entire stadium into a frenzy: “Bye Bye mbavha bye bye! Bye Bye mhondi bye bye! Bye Bye Mnangagwa bye bye! Bye Bye Chiwenga bye bye!…”
His message was less about rebuilding and peace: it was more about anger, retribution and hatred.
Senior politicians around Chamisa such as Tendai Biti even listed all the former liberation war veterans who died of various causes and told a public rally in Harare East that they had all been murdered by Mnangagwa.
Mnangagwa, on the other side, went for dozens of rallies without even mentioning Chamisa by name. He focused on his policies and programmes, preached peace and unity and working together. Whether he was sincere or not is quite another thing, but at least even the MDC could be seen holding rallies wherever they fancied without fear of being attacked by ZANU-PF sponsored as would happen in the Mugabe era. Chamisa even held right rallies in some traditional strongholds of ZANU-PF and no one soul was threatened.
When Chamisa lost the elections, he used Constitutional provisions to challenge the result, which was commendable. When the Constitutional Court ruled against him on August 24, Chamisa went haywire.
Soon after a unanimous court decision confirming his victory in the electoral challenge by Chamisa, Mnangagwa took to his official Twitter page to call for peace and unity and subsequently invited Chamisa to work with him.
“I once again reiterate my call for peace and unity above all. Nelson Chamisa, my door is open and my arms are outstretched, we are one nation and we must put our nation first. Let us all now put our differences behind us. It’s time to move forward together,” he said.
Chamisa spurned the offer. “You can’t rob me of my goats then you come and say let’s share those goats,” he said, adding, “Let’s first have a restitution, each for each, then we can start to talk. I don’t want to end up being embarrassed instead of being embraced by arms that I do not know.”
Instead of testing Mnangagwa’s sincerityby accepting to talk Chamisa demanded keys to the State House, even though it was clear negotiation with Mnangagwa was a path of least resistance as opposed to confrontation. The biggest problem is that when Nelson Chamisa takes such childish stances, his supporters and followers don’t critique and advise him. He is so flawless in their eyes.
Reality is that Chamisa now wants the talks and ZANU-PF has labelled him too immature to see the bigger picture of nation building.
Key ZANU-PF organs, the war veterans and the women’s league, are shutting the doors for talks and raising the age to ensure Chamisa does not contest the 2023 and 2028 elections.
The biggest loser is Chamisa and the MDC, not Mnangagwa and his party.
The threat of isolation and interference by the West which the MDC celebrates will force ZANU-PF to pull out the sovereignty card, shut down the little democratic spaces it had opened, draw down the curtain and get really hard on MDC supporters.
We have travelled that road before with Robert Mugabe. All the pain of hyper inflation, of lost pensions and savings, of electricity load shedding and joblessness of the past two decades did not affect the ZANU-PF chefs but it decimated the urban MDC supporter.
During Zimbabwe’s international isolation era, ruling elites could still afford foreign shopping trips, foreign medication, cheap business loans from quasi-government banks, foreign education for their children and all the good things in life.
When economic crisis bites and international agencies donate to the poor in Zimbabwe, the aid would be handed over through well-knit ZANU zPF structures, further disenfranchising the MDC supporter.
Mature MDC supporters should know this as they experienced it in the past. Some scurried to foreign lands and now only follow the opposition on social media but cannot come to vote.
No amount of international isolation, sanctions, or economic decline will force MDC onto power. With their backs to the wall, ZANU-PF will simply print more bonds and support their rural base and continue winning elections by all means fair and foul. After all, 71% of Zimbabweans are in rural areas, according to World Bank 2017 data. And the urban folk will be forced to re-pay Zimbabwe’s domestic debt through taxes as happened to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe debt which we are paying to date yet it’s ruling party elites that benefitted from Gideon Gono’s policies. The MDC needs a mature leader to read into all this.
In the 1990s, when faced with a debt crisis, Mugabe simply defaulted. In the 2000s, when he ran out of money, he simply printed more. When that sparked hyperinflation he ditched Zimbabwe’s currency in favour of the dollar. Mnangagwa can still do the same and get away with it as did Mugabe.
The Mugabe-Tsvangirai political fights brought only one winner: Mugabe. He might have lost power in the 2017 November coup, but he is being taken good care of by his party and government, living like the king he is, getting all his medical bills catered for, and still earning every penny he earned as a sitting President. His wife Grace told us they’re fine and dandy with President Emmerson Mnangagwa in charge.
As ZANU-PF kicks off its annual people’s conference in Esigodini today, Chamisa must be very, very afraid and cross his fingers that the proposal to increase the minimum presidential age limit does not carry the day.
Unfortunately, it is hard to see ZANU-PF backing off on that. They seem to have made it the key proposal at the conference, allowing to take more weight than proposals to build the economy or lessening the impact of austerity measures on the citizenry.
This might be the biggest sign yet that ZANU-PF has entered its default settings. Remember ZANU-PF old madalas were not jettisoned from power: Mnangagwa simply placed them at Jongwe House for a rainy day such as this one when the party has its backs to the wall. Even those accused of corruption are being caught and released, a sure sign they’re still needed.
Nelson Chamisa might as well voluntarily resign leadership of the MDC and call for Congress so that age-compliant party stalwarts like Elias Mudzuri, Welshman Ncube, Douglas Mwonzora, Tendai Biti etc can take over.
There is a high chance we won’t see Chamisa’s name on the presidential ballot paper until at least 2033. Whether we like it or not, Nelson Chamisa’s presidential future is in the hands of the men and women wearing ZANU-PF regalia in Esigodini this week.
Felix Chiroro can be reached via [email protected]