Back to the drawing board for Welshman's MDC

FOLLOWING its heavy defeat in the July 31, 2013 elections, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) led by Welshman Ncube is going back to the drawing board to rejuvenate itself. Party officials believe that the party needs to focus primarily on rebuilding structures and revamping its membership to stand a good chance in the next elections, scheduled for 2018.

A post-mortem of the party's performance in last year's harmonised elections by some members of the MDC has shown some discrepancies between numbers of registered members and those of actual votes cast. This points to the existence of "disoriented" structures which need major revamping if there is to be any improved performance in 2018 polls.

Six months after the elections, the party's planning committee is, however, still to meet and strategise, raising some serious doubts as to whether the MDC has enough stamina and resolve to move strongly and convincingly ahead. The party's planning committee would be tasked with drawing up a new policy that would carry the MDC into the next election.

"We are still yet to have an initial meeting of the planning team, so that we can put in place our plans," said Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga, the party's secretary-general. While admitting that the MDC has been nursing its wounds since the July polls, Misihairabwi-Mushonga is adamant that the party would this year work on moving forward.

".. After an election, the main focus will be to rebuild our structures which must be under a lot of disorientation after the results of the July 31 elections. A membership drive is also at the top of our agenda, as we had a lot of people who were registered as MDC members, but when doing a post-mortem of the July 31 election results, one finds that there is no tally between the membership and the results we got," she said.

Misihairabwi-Mushonga told the Financial Gazette recently that the MDC would take a cue from Zanu-PF and embark on door-to-door campaigns, as a primary instrument to register voters. "We will not do voter registration in 2018, we will do it immediately. We are certainly making sure that we will prepare for the next elections which we will take part in," she said.

In the run-up to the harmonised elections, the Ncube-led MDC had hoped to ride on an election campaign anchored on devolution or decentralisation of power to provinces. The expectation had been that devolution would resonate with the electorate in the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces where people feel they have been marginalised under a Zanu-PF administration. But instead, the party suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of both Zanu-PF, which won the elections convincingly, and their sister party, the MDC-T led by Morgan Tsvangirai.

Political observers however, commend Ncube's MDC for demonstrating maturity by opting to focus its energies on the revival of its structures, instead of poking holes at Zanu-PF's election win, which would have been a futile exercise.  In an interview last year, Ncube said that party members had the right to ask tough questions about the current leadership and its election performance including deciding on who should lead the party at its congress set for January 2016.

Since its infamous split from the main MDC-T in 2005, Ncube's MDC has been barely above the water, dogged as it has been by leadership wrangles, accusation of tribalism and allegations of imposition of candidates.  Lately, key members of the party have been abandoning ship in moves pointing to disillusionment and hopelessness amongst part of its membership. The party's journey since its split from the larger MDC-T has indeed been woeful.

It put forward Arthur Mutambara, the former deputy prime minister in the government of national unity (GNU), to lead the party, but deteriorating relations with him and perhaps also loss of confidence by other members of the party, resulted in the robotics professor's ouster at a January 2011 congress.  This made the MDC the only party that changed leadership in the course of the GNU - a development which critics say exposed the instability within its ranks.

The leadership tug of wars that then ensued only served to destabilise the party further. This contrasted starkly with President Robert Mugabe's vice-like grip on Zanu-PF for over three decades and Tsvangirai's tight control of the MDC-T for the last 14 years.  In the eyes of other political parties - Zanu-PF and the MDC-T - Ncube's MDC is widely considered a lightweight, with little hope of changing the status quo.

Its alliance with ZAPU led by Dumiso Dabengwa in the run-up to last year's elections, failed to make an impression and instead gave fodder to critics who argued that Ncube's MDC was structured along tribal lines. The MDC has denied any tribal connotations and has insisted that it is a national party, with the interests of all Zimbabweans at heart.