By Ndaba Nhuku| The founder syndrome prevalent among our organizations, political parties, charity organizations, churches and companies is sickeningly retrogressive!
This applies to those angry that some founder menbers of the MDC who worked for many years with its late president Morgan Tsvangirai (may his dearest soul rest in peace) were not elected as leaders at its recent Congress.
Founder member leadership mentality stops organisation s’ growth and success and the injection of new ideas. It can be tolerated in companies and possibly blindly accepted in churches as they deal with spiritual and prophetic matters determined by the founder.
However, in political parties, the founder syndrome must not be tolerated or accepted at all. Whilst we voluntarily become members of political parties as we do in churches, the huge difference is that political parties are aimed at governance.
Once in power, they rule over EVERYONE in the land, whether you support them or no. Therein lies the need to not allow founder ownership of political parties.
Parties belong to the collective members who elect their leadership. Founder members are not lifelong leaders. Parties members can choose new leaders and move on. A typical example is that Ndabaningi Sithole and others founded Zanu but were sacked from the party with Mugabe taking over.
Mugabe was consequently fired in a coup by the army that opted to impose Mnangagwa. ANC, the oldest political party south of Sahara changed leadership many times firing some of the founders.
A political party can not be owned by individuals as that would be beginning of a dynasty which the world long awakened to its dangers.
There is therefore no need for purportedly enlightened democratic forces in Zim to go about telling us about founder members of MDC as entitled to continue as leaders of the party.
Once they fail to deliver, or members feel they don’t want them to continue leading for whatever reason, they have a right to kick them out. Being a member of a party, let alone a leader, is something based on acceptance and voluntary identification with the party. It is not an act of permanent identity like your family or clan.
Members can fire you whenever they feel you are no longer effective to the aims of the organisation. That can be failure to articulate, to attain or pursue its collective members’ goals. This being a founder doesn’t mean you will continuously be able to do this.
A founder has a right to leave the organisation should s/he feel the majority of the members and leaders have since ceased pursuing it’s aims. Noone is forced to remain a member as if it’s a mafia organisation.
MDC and those who have left it for whatever reasons must know that MDC doesn’t belong to founder members. It is a party that belongs to its members as does Zanu and any other political party unless specifically formed as a party whose purpose is to fulfill the objectives of the founder members installed as lifelong leaders.
Zimbabwe has not yet seen such a party. All are formed as voluntary democratic organisation anyone is free to join or leave. Democracy will only prevail if we stop seeing political leaders as demigods and when we stop taking founder leaders of political parties as lifelong leaders even when they clearly cannot serve the organisation effectively anymore.
The Constitution and aims of the organisation must be it’s soul that determines the choosing of an effective leadership. In democracy, noone should has an automatic right to political leadership of a political organization.