Speaking himself into trouble

RECKLESS: Morgan Tsvangirai peppered inauguration speech with promises

YOU can bet on many things, but one sure winner is that Morgan Tsvangirai will make a promise he cannot deliver on.

In the last year alone, he has issued ultimatums against Robert Mugabe and made declarations only to backpedal furiously when the veteran leader and his minions called his bluff.

Now that he is Prime Minister, Tsvangirai may want to pause a little and consider the things he says, and the promises he makes, because the consequences are now doubly serious.

Listening to his inauguration speech on Wednesday, I was struck by the recklessness of his pledges, and his failure to stick to his script which his advisers would have without doubt spent dozens of hours combing through to ensure its accuracy.

But once Tsvangirai took to that rostrum, it felt like Robin Hood had just arrived in Mbare – randomly dishing out goodies to all who can say his name. The trouble, of course, is that government does not work like that.

I will not address his promise to pay all civil servants in foreign currency by month-end, others have already done so, and will continue to do so for weeks to come.

But I just wonder how he managed to veer off his script and end up making a promise which clearly is beyond his capacity to deliver.

“It hurts that as we celebrate here today, there are some who are in prison,” Tsvangirai said towards the end of his address. “I can assure you that they are not going to remain in those dungeons any day or any week longer.”

Really? Since when has the Prime Minister become the Supreme Court and the Director of Prisons? For he certainly is not Michael Scofield! Can he really be sure he can spring Jestina Mukoko free from jail within hours?

Now, what should be particularly painful to Tsvangirai’s advisers and the men and women who prepared his speech is that they had found the correct terminology to address the problem. Their text was legally upright, because these are prisoners, and fit to come out of the mouth of a Prime Minister, not an opposition leader.

In the prepared speech, available here, Tsvangirai should have said: “As I stand before you, more than 30 innocent people continue to languish in jail months after being abducted and illegally detained.

“While I will not interfere in the judicial process, I will make it a priority to ensure that the law is upheld and that the justice system deals with their cases in a fair, equitable and transparent manner in the shortest possible time frame.”

The difference between what he was prepared to say and what he ended up saying is just plainly unacceptable, not least because it’s a promise he cannot deliver on for obvious reasons.

Even when he said what he said, he could have mitigated the damage by sticking closer to the prepared script. After declaring “… they are not going to remain in those dungeons any day or any week longer”, he could have added “than is necessary”, thereby freeing himself from a tight deadline which his words have effectively set.

The problems ahead for our new Prime Minister are just gargantuan, and he certainly doesn’t need me or anyone else doing this. But he can make his troubles less so by sticking to the script and working with others to achieve certain ends, without the grandstanding synonymous with opposition politics.