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Does Zimbabwe really need a new political party now?
By Tanonoka Joseph Whande
Friday, May 9, 2008
Dr SIMBA Makoni is doing it again!
He says he is going to form a political party in August this year, hardly four months after the Zimbabwean electorate handed him a humiliating defeat of less than 8 percent of the vote in the still simmering scandalous presidential election.
Forming another party is hardly the kind of thing Zimbabwe needs right now. If anything, political leaders outside Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF should by now have realized the common enemy they have to contend with instead of forming endless and ineffective parties that will do no less than polarize the people.
Makoni’s spokesperson, Denford Magora, justified this inopportune move by saying, “Provincial coordinators of the former minister’s movement had reported that Zimbabweans were impatient for a new alternative to the MDC and Zanu-PF that have dominated the political scene for the past decade.”
This can hardly be accurate.
Yes, Zimbabweans are impatient with Mugabe and Zanu-PF. But where would their impatience with the Movement for Democratic Change emanate from since the MDC has never formed a government.
For Makoni and his advisors to say this at a time when people have finally gone to the polls and effected a peaceful plebiscite that handed both Mugabe and his Members of Parliament significant defeats is clearly regrettable because it is just not true as the March 29 vote tally clearly showed.
After almost a decade of rigged elections, violence and economic mismanagement, Zimbabweans finally got it right, in spite of attempts to rig the elections.
If anything, people are happy with what they did, although they were robbed of outright victory, with Mugabe, once again, shaving off a few percentage points from the MDC’s tally to force a run-off.
This is the time Zimbabweans should stand as one, take advantage of the opening and put Zanu-PF to pasture, permanently. It is not the time to form splinter groups. This is the time when people should be coming together for the final push not to fragment into more little parties.
“The best way forward for our battered nation is the establishment of a Transitional National Commission, National Authority, or as others have called it, a government of national unity,” said Makoni in an opinion piece published by the on-line Zimbabwe Guardian earlier this week. “This route, the only one left open to Zimbabweans who actually have the interest of the nation at heart, has been grossly misrepresented and, at times, deliberately misunderstood.”
There is no misunderstanding here at all.
Zimbabwean politicians, and indeed African politicians in general, have shown this selfish and power hungry-streak for decades. They don’t want to join anyone; they want to be joined. In other words, as long as they remain at the helm, unity is a patriotic thing to achieve.
Before the elections, people in and outside Zimbabwe heaped praise on Makoni to such an extent that he had the temerity to turn down joining forces with the MDC but, instead, wanted Tsvangirai and the MDC to join him, even though he, like now, had no party.
Makoni was not interested in uniting with the opposition, now he is all for a common purpose, in the form of a government of national unity (GNU).
A government of national unity cannot work when the principals are divided and when they do not share a common vision for the future of the nation. But while a GNU might work, it is the absence of passionate conviction, a clear philosophy and ideology behind such demands that worries me.
Their absence is dangerous and destructive because we have seen how our politicians just want to be in a position of power and principles and ideology be damned.
People are asked to follow an individual not to believe in particular hopes, circumstances and visions.
When he was under the false impression that he could win, Makoni didn’t want anything to do with the MDC. Early this week, after losing dismally, he proposes such a union in the same week he promises Zimbabweans a new political party. Does Makoni want to be accommodated so he can later walk away with other parties’ supporters?
The other MDC faction was also under the impression that they would humiliate Tsvangirai’s MDC at the polls and wanted Tsvangirai to join them. All the leaders of that faction lost their bids to enter Parliament.
However, unlike Makoni, the small MDC faction managed to win 12 parliamentary seats and I applaud that because those 12 parliamentarians and their constituencies must be having a different view of what to do with Zimbabwe.
But after the poll results were published, they also ran to Tsvangirai to offer unity and suggested working together.
In that somewhat passive Guardian opinion piece in which he pleads for a government of national unity, Makoni also talks about “a hung Parliament” but for a different reason.
“We have two major parties in Parliament, divided almost exactly in half,” he said. “A sliver-thin majority for the MDC, with a majority of two seats, is not a basis for the establishment of a government.”
I am tempted to ask, “What then is the basis of a government?” if not a majority, however little?
Granted, Makoni warns, Parliament might “frustrate the efforts of the executive in the hope of forcing a situation of an ungovernable state”.
Why?
Such a development, he said, might cause the President to rule by decree, which, he adds, would be “understandable in the first instance, if the provisions are being used to take the country forward”.
Here, once again, we see the old discredited Zanu-PF mentality that required parliamentarians to fight for Mugabe’s wishes in Parliament at the expense of people’s wishes.
“Zimbabwe’s politicians, so blinded by the obsession with power, have simply closed their ears and consciences to this eventuality, demanding that any accommodation should involve giving them power,” said Makoni.
It is acceptable that Morgan Tsvangirai has paid his dues in opposition politics. We have witnessed his abuse and attempted murder at the hands of Makoni’s mentor.
And here comes Makoni again to muddy the waters just like he did during the March elections.
Is this not what he meant by “politicians blinded by the obsession with power” and might he not be the one demanding that any accommodation should involve giving him power?
Makoni will be a good prospect one of these days but he is too much in a hurry and is tarnishing his own image.
The people of Zimbabwe are tired of politics of patronage and Makoni is still to offer explanations that set him apart from not only Zanu-PF but from the MDC as well.
We may need Makoni tomorrow but his attempt to take advantage of people’s misery and usurp a political path hacked by others while he lay in cohorts with Zanu-PF is an insult to the masses.
Even now as we speak, it is not lost on the people that today Makoni has the Zimbabwean opposition political stage to himself with the likes of Tsvangirai and MDC secretary general, Tendai Biti, being threatened with arrest should they return home.
So is the run-off going to be between Mugabe and Makoni then?
Makoni must get rid of his advisors who were recruited from the discredited Zanu-PF. They are misleading him and, like they used to do with Mugabe, they are telling Makoni what he wants to hear.
Makoni must be his own man. His options are not limited for he has the brains and suave to see himself through. But, before all that, he should either go back to Zanu-PF and apologise or he should stand there and be man enough to offer himself as a totally different and unique package.
He can do it and people will reward him accordingly.
(Tanonoka Joseph Whande is a Botswana-based Zimbabwean journalist.
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