News Day
By Kholwani Nyathi
23 January 2013
Debate on the need for a united front against Zanu PF in the forthcoming elections has been gaining traction at different platforms in the past few months.
MDC president Welshman Ncube, MDC-T secretary-general Tendai Biti and MDC secretary for legal affairs David Coltart are some of the prominent politicians who have shared their views about the proposed coalition.
There are some who appear convinced that such a coalition against Zanu PF and President Robert Mugabe will work only if it is led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.
Their argument makes sense because Tsvangirai had a good showing in the last elections where he beat Mugabe in the first round of the presidential elections.
His MDC-T also won the highest number of parliamentary seats against Zanu PF and the MDC.
These views are reportedly shared by the international donor community who are trying to coax other smaller parties to rally behind Tsvangirai.
Ncube and his party have taken the flak for insisting that they will not consider an election pact or re-unification with the MDC-T.
The MDC says it does not want to repeat the same mistake that it made on the eve of the 2008 elections where at the last minute, the MDC-T National Council rejected an election pact after lengthy and promising negotiations.
But that has not stopped some political observers from lynching Ncube and his party, with some accusing them of working in cahhots with Zanu PF.
People are entitled to their opinions, but it is wrong to behave as if other politicians owe Tsvangirai anything to be obliged to support his candidature.
The MDC-T leader has not demonstrated that he needs help from any of the opposition leaders and some of his public utterances showed some arrogance that might spoil his third attempt to unseat Mugabe.
Last week, Tsvangirai chose to fight in Mugabe’s corner rather than support Ncube in his battle to have the Zanu PF leader to respect a Sadc resolution on the Global Political Agreement (GPA) principals.
Sadc leaders at their last summit in Maputo resolved that Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara would no longer be recognised as a GPA principal because he had lost the leadership of the MDC.
Mugabe has stubbornly refused to respect the resolution and has stuck with Mutambara. Unwittingly, the MDC-T has isolated Ncube and his party by their stance. Tsvangirai has also labelled Ncube “a village politician†in the past suggesting that he is too popular to bother about an election alliance to fight Zanu PF.
However, such thinking is very short-sighted.
Previous elections have shown that there isn’t much separating Zanu PF and the MDC-T.
Although the MDC formations won most of the seats in the elections, Zanu PF won the popular vote in most provinces.
The next elections will be a different ballgame altogether for the MDC formations because the element of protest votes might not be a factor.
Zimbabwe has enjoyed relative economic stability for the past four years and voting patterns will be adjusted accordingly.
True, Zimbabweans are yearning for change, but they will not vote for Tsvangirai just for the sake of it.He has to demonstrate that he is a leader capable of uniting all Zimbabweans regardless of their political backgrounds.
If Tsvangirai cannot look beyond the petty issues that led to his fallout with Ncube and the subsequent split of the MDC, can he be trusted to reconcile with a defeated Zanu PF?
It is not too late for him to start reaching out not only to the MDC, but also Simba Makoni’s MKD and Dumiso Dabengwa’s Zapu.
The missing discourse in the way Ncube has been lynched on social media is the fact that it was Tsvangirai’s fault, not the MDC’s, that the coalition collapsed last time.
Failure to rally opposition leaders to support his candidacy will suggest that he still doesn’t understand that he needs these “smaller parties†more than they need him, judging by the margin with which he failed to secure an outright victory in March 2008.