Heads must roll

Heads must roll

• MDC splits widen after senate vote

• Tsvangirai: We are out

• Nyathi: We are in

• MDC to boycott senate - Tsvangirai

• Melusi Nyathi: MDC must reconnect with people

• Mugabe sets November 26 Senate poll date

• Tsvangirai plays down rift with Ncube

• Oscar Nkala: MDC should snub senate

• Mugabe calls senate poll for November, MDC undecided

• Msekiwa Makwanya: the MDC, the senate and boycott politics

• Morgan Tsvangirai: The senate, what's in it for the people?

• Grace Kwinjeh: No to senate elections!

• Kwinjeh attacks MDC senate poll participation

• MDC to contest for senate seats

• Prof Jonathan Moyo: New amendments should face battle royal

• New constitutional moves 'will not fly'

• Chinamasa slammed over 'exit visa' threat

• Innocent C Sithole: The MDC and 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 senate will last only 5 years

By Comment from ZW News

ON WEDNESDAY, we were treated to the unedifying spectacle of the MDC president telling a press conference that the party would be boycotting the forthcoming senate elections, and the party spokesman simultaneously emailing the world to say exactly the opposite.

Tsvangirai said that, the National Council being split 50:50, he had used his casting vote in favour of a boycott. The party spokesman said the vote was 33 to 31 in favour of participation, with two spoilt papers. Whoever wrote the script for this farce has a glittering career ahead in television comedy. Except that there was no script. And this wasn’t really about whether or not to join the senatorial gravy queue, about which there are strong arguments on both sides.

Wednesday's slapstick was ultimately about the opposition leadership at odds with itself.

The MDC was founded on the principle of non-violence, determined to beat Zanu PF at the ballot box. It has spent five long years, as part of the broad front of civil society, pursuing those principled objectives, subjected at every step to everything that Zanu PF, and Zanu PF’s allies in SADC, could throw at it. There are courageous men and women at all levels in the MDC. No-one can say otherwise. But strategically and tactically, the party’s top decision-making process has become inept.

You don’t threaten to boycott the 2005 parliamentary elections, then take part at the last minute. And then, having witnessed a more glaring electoral theft than you first feared, you don’t calmly take your seats in the House of Assembly as if nothing has happened.

You don’t tell the world that you will no longer be speaking to the South African government because you view Mbeki as a dishonest broker, and then take the first plane south when the phone rings from Pretoria.

You don’t table a raft of constitutional amendments in parliament, and then withdraw them before forcing Zanu PF to vote them down.

You don’t set party officials at each other’s throats, impounding cars and beating people up. That is the Zanu way. The MDC is supposed to be better than that.

Every day we read that Zanu PF, the government, almost every Zimbabwean still in the country and most of those out of it, are down to their last brass farthing.

Every day, rather than reading how this is undoing the Zanu PF regime, the only real political story in town concerns which faction of Zanu PF thugs is going to succeed Mugabe.

And each day the opposition party, on whom so many ordinary people have pinned their hopes, homes and livelihoods, is sliding further into irrelevance. Heads must roll in the MDC. Lots of them.
JOIN THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
newsdesk@newzimbabwe.com