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Open letter to Morgan Tsvangirai
By Concerned Zimbabwean
Dear Morgan,
I AM one of those people who fully support the attainment of a new Zimbabwe. I am not an MDC supporter or opponent, but just someone who has been watching Zimbabwe since your days in the Zanu PF youth league in the early 1980s.
It was the time of Gukurahundi, a time of serious suffering and mass murder for the people in today’s so-called MDC strongholds in Matabeleland and Midlands.
Your leadership of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) mass actions in the late 1990s inspired me in a great way to start hacking away the perceived invincibility of Zanu PF, personified here as Robert Mugabe, whom I understand is a relation of yours.
Relationships aside, let me get to the purpose of my first and last letter to you as one of the most outstanding leaders in the struggle for Zimbabwe.
Morgan, you have lost it. You cannot fight Mugabe’s dictatorial tendencies, which you have worked so hard to expose since the fight began in 1999, by copying them.
I have supported you through all the blunders from Dickens and Madison, through foolish and highly treasonous statements, including publicly threatening to remove Mugabe violently when you have never fired a gun even in anger.
You will of course remember that such statements damaged the MDC’s democratic credentials, particularly the clause on the use of non-violent means to achieve democratic change. In the end, you earned yourself a charge of treason and plenty of ridicule for the party from such organs as the State media. At that time, I didn’t call you a political failure although I did begin to ask myself if you knew anything about diplomatic and political deftness. I grudgingly forgave you.
In June 2003, you so badly misjudged the political temperature, your own level of political support and the retrogressive effect of such legislation as AIPPA and POSA and called for a 'Final Push' that never materialised. It was yet another monumental blunder but I still forgave you, thinking you needed time to grow from the orator and rabble-rouser I saw during the late 1990s mass action days to real presidential material.
I cannot hide my disgust now that you have all but proved yourself to be a selfish power monger and dictator, secure behind village militias puffed to the seams with stinking tribal-instigated hatred.
The fact that you choose to advocate for violence and chose to reinstate your own thugs even after disciplinary hearings does not make you any different from Mugabe who gave 5 Brigade members a presidential amnesty because they had done his bidding. By opposing the decision of the national council, you are acting exactly like Mugabe who ordered 11 000 Zimbabwean troops to go and fight save an unpopular toad in the Democratic Republic of Congo without consulting the cabinet and parliament.
By defying the vote of your own national council in favour of senate participation, you are proving yourself to be a dangerous, self centred dictator who apart from not honouring decisions reached by popular consensus in a democratic poll chooses to behave like Napoleon Bonaparte who found time to fight little feuds and never-ending wars instead of leading France out of the feudal age.
One thing you are proving though is that you are not a politician but an agent provocateur, thriving only in the chaos of mass action.
Your bereftness of political ideas and the fact that you have made yourself appear like a little God over the MDC constitution proves you to be the most unqualified candidate for the presidency. You cannot hope to be the president of Zimbabwe if you think of personal supremacy like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran. The rules of slander may not be that stringent in Zimbabwe but anyone who aspires to be president but still hopes to gain political mileage out of making divisive tribal slurs is like a cobra, and not different from Euegene Terre Blanche.
You cannot hope to be the president of Zimbabwe just by visiting mass graves, which I am sure you knew existed since your days in the Zanu PF Youth League. You cannot hope to earn votes and support for your lack of policy and visionary leadership by promising people in the Midlands and Matabeleland that an MDC government will bring Gukrahundi perpetrators to book when you are campaigning against their leaders at the same time. You cannot hope to get the crucial Matabele vote (ask Mugabe) by going around mass graves ridiculing Joshua Nkomo as a sell-out when the people know that he alone stopped the murders which you today seek to use as a back door to end your enstrangement from the people and the MDC constitution.
If Joshua Nkomo sold these parts to Zanu PF, it was a desperate effort, made under the murderous pressure of Zanu PF youths like you at the time. Who is fooling who, Morgan? All Zimbabweans with long memories will remember the field days The Herald got sometime in 2002 when it was revealed that you, as MDC president, was still listed as a Zanu PF member, meaning you were still a card holder. Your silence instead of denying that allegation proved that you were indeed a Zanu PF card holder, meaning you can still rejoin Zanu PF like many confused firebrands before you. Edgar Tekere and Dzikamai Mavhaire are good examples. It surprises me then that this Zanu PF card holder of yester-year can stand up and say the MDC leadership from Matabeleland is on the Zanu PF payroll. You can’t be serious.
Let those who did not know learn that Zanu PF allowed you to become that powerful at the ZCTU because you were not just a relative of Mugabe, but a prolific and loyal party cadre as well. So they allowed you to take care of the worker constituency, something you did for Mugabe until 1997. Your use and reliance on anti-Ndebele tribal slurs and discriminatory language is achieving the opposite effect from what you hope to get. It is making you stink Zanu PF and you are just as confused as they are about the real loyalties of the people of Matabeleland.
From what we have heard from your mouth so far, we have no choice but to identify you as a Zanu PF-bred tribalist of the worst order and tag you Public Enemy Number Two, deputising Mugabe. In the case of you and your confused supporters, (who twice opposed you and twice re-joined you) your anger against participation in the senate polls in understandable. All losers do the same thing, especially if they have emerged blood-nosed from every fights, fair and foul, even as better supported-boxers elsewhere win against the most overwhelming of odds.
You lost almost all the constituencies in the Mashonaland provinces and therefore do not have the MPs, and by extension the people to protect from the tired old age home candidates bearing Zanu PF vermin. I understand that you cannot have senators if you don’t even have MPs. But the situation in Matabeleland is different. You can still call yourself MDC president because of the constituencies the party has, most of which are in Matabeleland and the Midlands. Here is a region that has never voted for Zanu PF even as yester-year Zanu PF youths now turned dictatorial democrats raped and killed them. So Zanu PF simply does not have the space in Matabeleland and you know it. Your experience as a Zanu PF youth in the early 80s should tell you that you are the wrong person to tell these people to surrender the democratic space they have held so dearly onto, to your former masters in Zanu PF simply because you have said so in defiance of a democratic vote. No, Morgan!
The so-called Senate dispute, which I read as a right-thinking people standing up against a gang rape of the MDC constitution, has also exposed you as nothing but a political upstart, a street protester who excels only in organizing boycotts. You cannot boycott one election, participate in another, issue personal decrees against others and still think all of Zimbabwe has to follow you until you clear your confusion. No Morgan, you cannot tell me that the political field was level in 2002 when you lost the presidential elections.
It was not level when you agreed to participate in the last parliamentary elections. It is equally true that civil servants were already living in poverty, wages and people were starving when you went into the presidential and all the subsequent elections. Tens of MDC supporters, including your two aides, were dead. At least 12 commercial farmers had been butchered. Why didn’t you sacrifice the presidential vote of 2002 and ask that the monies be directed towards drought relief and civil service salaries? Was it because you thought you would win, even as you knew the so-called playing field had never been leveled since your days in Zanu PF? Why can't you just donate the funds you are currently abusing in your struggle to organise a senate boycott to the salaries of the civil servants you seem to love so dearly? Or to Operation Murambatsvina and the many poor sods you would by now have met in droves if you ever walked to work at all?
Your offer of senate election funds for salaries is not different from Dumiso Dabemgwa donating Z$200 million to the Nkulumane Traders Association because you are both trying to buy support, Dabengwa with money he has and you with money you do not have. Zimbabwe does have capable leaders beyond you; young and old. Trade union politics is easy, for it is based on one’s ability to rally work stoppages and boycotts, but governance, even that of broad-based parties, demands much more thought refinement than brazenly spilling nails and spikes on the roads to stop people from going to work or to vote.
You still have the opportunity to grow, especially if you can tune yourself into a democrat that respects popular votes. The democrat will also have to drop Zanu PF militia thinking and uphold the rule of law, even against home-boys and thugs who purport to sing from the same bible of non-violence. As a fine democract Morgan, I need to remind you that the emotions of people in Matabeleland were abused by Zanu PF in the early 1980s and that will not be allowed to happen again. Never, ever. Therefore any Zanu PF member, former or current, is not welcome to play on such emotions.
The skulls in the mass graves don’t like stranded political opportunists who use their bones as a carpet to State House, so do the living. And misfortunes follow offenders.
I shudder to think what a Zimbabwe under you would look like with all the theories you are coming up with to drum up tribal animosity between Zimbabweans, just so that you can remain life president of the MDC. I also feel very sorry for the increasingly paranoid William Bango. I remember his descriptions of Zanu PF propaganda during his tenure in the media and realize now that he was learning a lot then which has just come useful now. Speaking on behalf of you as a president who also doubles up as a personal speaker is obviously turning out to be a difficult job, hence the inconsistency.
Even those media outlets, run by your supporters in Zimbabwe and in the Diaspora, that have stood behind you in predicting that you have “crushed a rebellion’ when in-fact you were the rebel needing containment have had to lick their ugly festering wounds. They are now chiding themselves for the poverty of analysis and isolation from the Zimbabwean reality that they exhibited then.
Even such propaganda as Bango’s hallucinations about senate candidates withdrawing, altered in your office next day to say “low-calibre and unknown candidates” (as if the MDC ever had a high caliber president) faltered in the face of truth. Next time tell William that consistency is what makes one a reliable spokesman. And please stop speaking for yourself if his duty is to speak for you. Last but not least, a piece of advice: Anyone who claims to be a wise man and goes around offering advice to all but none to himself is not wise!!
Yours Truly,
A Concerned Zimbabwean
(ZANU PF
cannot rig MDC internal elections!)
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