The MDC and the culture of prevarication

The MDC and the culture of prevarication

• MDC wants to give senate a miss

• Prof Welshman Ncube: Constitutional reforms recipe for disaster

• Zim denies plot to curtail critics' travel

• Dr Alex Magaisa: Constitution without Constitutionalism

• Lucas Nkomo: The right to revolt against tyranny

• Tawanda Hove: Constitutional reforms and MDC mess

• US says Zim moves 'a sad step backwards'

• Rights groups condemn constitutional moves

• Paul Themba Nyathi: Dark day for democracy

• Parliament passes amendment bill

• Prof Jonathan Moyo: Constitutional madness will not save Zanu PF

• MDC ambush Zanu PF with draft constitution

• Zim tables bill to amend constitution

• Lawyers condemn constitutional amendment

• Aspiring Zanu PF senator dies of poisoning

• Alex Magaisa: Constitutional amendment spells doom for economy

• Chinamasa admits Zanu PF has no two thirds

• Zimbabwe opposition snubs Mugabe

• Zimbabwe senate will last only 5 years

• Moyo fights constitutional amendment

• Mugabe recalls Zimbabwe parliament

• Zanu PF accelerates Senate plans

• Mugabe appoints nephew to new Cabinet

• Mugabe to extend term

• Moyo on opposition benches as MPs sworn in

• Mugabe appoints governors, Cabinet expected

• Mugabe vows to rule for a century

By Innocent Chofamba Sithole

THE MDC is increasingly coming across as a motley of antithetical interests whose main bond was a desire to exploit the 'moment for democratic change' that presented itself in the upsurge of opposition to the ruling Zanu PF at the turn of the millennium.

Nothing illustrates this more than the party's agonising over whether or not to participate in the general election in March and, more recently, the current indecisive stance with respect to participation in the senate elections scheduled later in the year. What is clearly apparent is the lack of intra-party consensus on core principles on the basis of which a coherent guiding strategy should be devised.

For those who have closely followed the party's game plan in the last three years, the breakdown of the 'democratic movement' (MDC plus civil society allies) became quite glaring since the aftermath of the highly contested 2002 presidential election. Convinced that the 'moment for democratic change' still held, the MDC made the unusual decision to press for the singular objective of a re-run of the disputed polls. This decision seemed feasible and convenient at the time. Mass anger directed at the ruling party over the apparent electoral fraud was at boiling point, and western resentment of the Mugabe government was both fierce and total. In the MDC's calculation, nothing could surely rescue this beleaguered regime from such a determined combination of popular domestic opposition and diplomatic strangulation by 'those that govern our globe'.

No, not even South Africa's Thabo Mbeki and other African elites could smother this pivotal moment with their diplomatic interventions. And yet they did. It all started with the MDC's demobilisation of its mass movement in favour of doing a 'Lancaster House' with Zanu PF at the behest of Mbeki and Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo. They reckoned that if this failed they would approach the newly repackaged - and now more 'patriotic' - bench to challenge Mugabe's legitimacy. The MDC also chose to deviate from the core principle on the basis of which the amorphous social forces within civil society had come together with the common objective of playing midwife to a new, democratic Zimbabwe.

It should be remembered here that constitutional reform was deduced to be the elementary objective without whose achievement the struggle for a democratic Zimbabwe would be stillborn. It was, therefore, not an accident of history that the first political formation Morgan Tsvangirai came to lead after the ZCTU was the National Constitutional Assembly. And yet when the MDC approached the negotiation table they had as their main legal demand piecemeal electoral law reform as a preparatory step for re-running the presidential election.

To begin with, the negotiation route was naively optimistic and the demand for legal reforms outside of wholesale constitutional reform was dangerously opportunistic. The NCA was left flailing its arms in exasperation as the MDC pursued a strategy informed primarily and almost exclusively by the desire to take over the reins of the unreformed state from Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF. Many remember the NCA's desperate protestations in full-page newspaper adverts countering the MDC's minimalist legal reform and election re-run agenda with calls for a complete constitutional overhaul 'now!' The MDC rebutted with platitudes about their commitment to a new constitution but made it unequivocally clear that this would come after the party had assumed power.

Effectively, and for similar power-political calculations, the MDC was in consensus with Zanu PF's pronouncement that constitutional reform was not a priority.

With the collapse of the inter-party talks (to be fair, they never really took off), the MDC was left brandishing its legal challenge to
Mugabe's legitimacy as its most potent political weapon. They still brandish it to this day, only a mere two and half years from the next
Presidential election and by which time Mugabe himself would have pretty much completed the preface to his memoirs!

Having earlier demobilised its raring charges, the MDC found its way back to the mass action route, albeit 15 months after the disputed presidential election! Zimbabweans were told to spill into the streets in June 2003 in what was to be the 'final push' against Mugabe's regime.

Ironically, MDC secretary-general Welshman Ncube had some months earlier discounted the mass action route in a national newspaper interview saying: "We are a sensitive party, we will not send people to die on the streets." In essence, the failure of the MDC's 'final push' did not owe itself to the robust response of the state apparatus, for that was predictable and therefore a redundant factor in the party's strategic planning. Rather, it lay in the opposition party's prevarication on the option to seize the Machiavellian moment immediately after the elections and champion a mass action programme with the demand for wholesale, people-driven constitutional reform at its core. The 'final push' was thus tantamount to striking the hammer when the iron had gone cold (Zvanzi naMacheso simbi inorohwa ichapisa!).

The drawn-out dilly-dallying over participating or boycotting this year's general elections was yet more evidence of the strategic constipation plaguing the MDC. The decision to finally put their head on the guillotine (announcing participation eight weeks before the poll must surely be considered electoral suicide) was, in my view, less out of political bravery than it was a sign of the deep-seated fear of floating in uncertain political limbo following the election boycott. In short, either the boycott threat rested on no substantive strategic alternative, or intra-party consensus failed to yield on those options that were proffered. An earlier and swifter decision on the matter surely could have revived the enthusiasm of its supporters and ensured the party survived the kind of rout that it eventually suffered.

But it is the latest hair-splitting over the Senate elections that comes across as even more ludicrous. For those within the MDC who are pushing for a boycott, how do they reconcile this position to their party's presence in one chamber of the House? As long as they sit in the Lower House the Senate will be part of them since the two work together. It does not make sense to attend one and boycott the other.

The MDC should consider a boycott only within the context of a total withdrawal from parliament altogether, for that is the only way in which it sounds free of contradiction. A policy of cherry-picking elections in which to participate hardly makes for coherence in principle. If at all, it leaves MDC supporters more confused and disillusioned.
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