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'He doesn't have the anointing to lead'
By Peta
Thornycroft
AHEAD of
the March general election, a long-serving human rights activist commented
in casual conversation to journalists that Morgan Tsvangirai would never
lead Zimbabwe.
She said: “He does not have what it takes to be the one.”
She didn't believe he had the qualities for the job, but couldn't define what those qualities were.
The Movement for Democratic Change was the fastest growing political party in Africa's history when, as a nine-month-old organisation, it came within a whisker of beating Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF in the 2000 general election despite appalling state-sponsored violence.
Now the party is in shreds, irreconcilably divided between loyalists of party president Tsvangirai and the other faction unofficially led by secretary-general Welshman Ncube, an acerbic lawyer.
Deep divisions of style and content within the MDC coalesced over participation in last Saturday's senate elections, with Tsvangirai calling for a boycott, and Ncube saying the party had a constitutional obligation to obey a narrow decision by its national council to take part and defend its political space.
Tsvangirai successfully led a boycott, which also “decampaigned” 26 MDC candidates who lost all but seven senate seats in its strongholds.
The split is getting uglier by the day with youths guarding the entrance to the MDC's scruffy city centre headquarters to ensure Ncube doesn't enter.
John Makumbe, a veteran political scientist who is largely supportive of Tsvangirai, says: “He is a trade unionist who didn't know what a political consultant was before 2000.
“He is naive, even now, but he is the most courageous leader Zimbabwe has ever had, politically gullible and, to use a phrase from someone who was talking about him this week, he doesn't have the ‘anointing' to lead.”
Another political observer, who remains neutral in the fatal split, says Tsvangirai “is brave, compassionate, hard- working, naive, headstrong, and latterly, self-important.
“He lost self-confidence when he was charged with treason weeks before the presidential election of 2002, which was Mugabe's master stroke.
“Morgan does not abide by the collective decisions of his elected officials. Had he consulted them, he would never have fallen into that trap.
“The treason trial diverted his attention from the election, completely drained the party's financial resources and consumed the MDC so fundamentally it never recovered.”
Tsvangirai was trapped by an intelligence sting in Canada, believing he was hiring a political lobbyist and fund-raiser, who had actually been hired by Zimbabwean Security Minister Nicholas Goche to implicate Tsvangirai in a non-existent plot to assassinate Mugabe.
He was acquitted two years later.
“Morgan trusts people who are patently incompetent and he has ignored or demoted some of the most talented members because he saw them as a threat,” the observer says.
That is also a widely held view by several of Tsvangirai's confidantes, providing of course that they are not identified.
“Organisation for the mass protest in 2003 was in the hands of an entirely incompetent official whom Morgan trusted, and still does. It was chaotic.”
That was the last MDC demonstration.
“If he had not been so impulsive he would not have alienated Thabo Mbeki as he did in 2003 when he called him a liar. What he said was correct, there were no negotiations between the MDC and Zanu-PF as Mbeki claimed, but Morgan should have been diplomatic.”
Makumbe believes that even if Tsvangirai had the most sophisticated political skills and all the resources in the world, it would be impossible to defeat Mugabe democratically and persuade stodgy old Africa that he was not a “British puppet”.
Former MDC MP Roy Bennett, one of Tsvangirai's most loyal supporters who lost his parliamentary seat when he was sent to prison last year, says:
“I am not sure any outsider, including you journalists, has any real idea of how badly the people were punished by Mugabe for supporting the MDC. I have seen things which have never been reported, the most terrible, terrible things.
“I am furious at the leadership, all of them. They let the people down.”
The management committee, which used to run the MDC's daily affairs, admits it failed to restrain Tsvangirai's “indiscretions” or effectively censure his mistakes so he wouldn't repeat them.
“It is true, we tried to keep the party together at all costs to overcome Mugabe,” says one of them.
There is no obvious replacement for Tsvangirai, certainly not Ncube who has known all his life that no Ndebele could lead Zimbabwe for the foreseeable future, despite the MDC's efforts to obliterate Mugabe's legacy of tribal and clan politics.
At present the rumours are flying to explain the collapse of the MDC.
The most persistent from Tsvangirai's camp is that Ncube had secret visits with Mbeki.
He has had a secret visit with Solomon Mujuru, a retired general whose wife Joice is vice president and who is manipulating Zanu-PF's succession problems.
He has, so the rumour goes, agreed with Mbeki that Tsvangirai must be ousted to allow Ncube to lead a government of national unity. Taking part in the senate elections was part of that plot, says this faction of the MDC.
The other side is convinced, but has no hard evidence, that Tsvangirai has surrounded himself with advisers in the pay of the Central Intelligence Organisation, whose job was to destroy the MDC through internal fighting.
If that's true,
they seem to have accomplished their mission - Star (SA)
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