Erstwhile friends, Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai.
MOVEMENT for Democratic Change (MDC-T) president Morgan Tsvangirai will confront ZANU-PF and its presidential candidate without the majority of allies with whom he founded the party in 1999. Most of these have either died or deserted the former trade union leader over sharp differences on policy and strategy, forming break-away formations that are now competing for power alongside his formation.
Tsvangirai will this month head to the party’s elective congress as a shoo-in for re-election after the party crushed dissent over his continued grip on party leadership by suspending deputy treasurer-general, Elton Mangoma, who later formed a break-away party together with secretary general, Tendai Biti, alongside several senior and founding party members.
Biti and Mangoma’s MDC has been christened MDC Renewal Team. It joins an MDC formation led by former secretary-general Welshman Ncube who split from Tsvangirai’s MDC-T alongside a long-time Tsvangirai ally from the trade union, Gibson Sibanda, who, however, died a few years ago.
While Tsvangirai is more likely to face his long-time foe, President Robert Mugabe, in the 2018 national elections, concern is mounting that he is unlikely to present a formidable opposition to ZANU-PF and its candidate especially given that he has now surrounded himself with a new breed of untested political leaders.
Some of those who have deserted Tsvangirai include Roy Bennett, Sekai Holland, Samuel Sipepa Nkomo and Grace Kwinjeh, among many others. Political commentator, Vivid Gwede, said the desertion of key allies, some of whom played the role of elders in the party, was likely to undermine Tsvangirai’s chances in national elections and besmirch his brand, which had already been tarnished by allegations of philandering.
“The rebellion of founding leaders is an indication that some of the leaders who have been present, felt they have not had his best ear on some critical issues. The indictment is just perhaps on the kind of advisers he chooses, interests and the criteria he uses,” said Gwede. Most recently, Holland, a former elder in the MDC-T, took up the interim presidency of the MDC Renewal Team after expressing dissatisfaction over Tsvangirai’s leadership.
Holland said about her defection from Tsvangirai’s party: “It is clear that the MDC-Tsvangirai has become the personal property of one individual. It is time to reject that and return to our founding principles… The MDC Renewal Team is where those who still adhere to the original values and principles of the party are regrouping.”
Jacob Mafume, the spokesperson of the MDC Renewal Team and a former legal adviser to Tsvangirai, said the MDC-T leader was “like a fish that had run out of water” but frantically trying to remain alive. Tsvangirai was recently unsuccessful in pushing through a raft of changes to the MDC-T constitution, which would have allowed him to make appointments to key organs of the party, giving him too much power and weakening both the membership and the secretary-general in terms of running party affairs.
Douglas Mwonzora, the MDC-T spokesman, told journalists after a meeting of the national council which rejected attempts to handpick officials that “we have been able to keep the party on its democratic path”.
Kwinjeh, once a fierce defender of Tsvangirai, said the party had departed from its original values, as a broad-based coalition representing people who shared a common desire to fight for change that would usher in a new democratic dispensation in Zimbabwe. “In that regard, 15 years ago, I think there was unity of purpose, self-sacrifice, and honesty in the way things were done, which is gone today. Now it’s sad to watch how we seem to spend more time, doing each other down, instead of focusing on the project we all started, that we discipline ourselves, to take this fight to its logical conclusion ― a free and prosperous Zimbabwe,” she said.
Tsvangirai will certainly find the battle against President Mugabe’s ZANU-PF more difficult without support from former comrades.
newsdesk@fingaz.co.zw