Welshman Ncube Studio 7 interview; Part 1 of 3

Bulawayo 24 responds to popular demand for a transcript of the much talked about Welshman Ncube and Gibbs Dube interview on Studio 7. Here is the first part of the 3 part transcript. Keep checking for part 2 and part 3.

Gibbs Dube (GD): Its good to actually talk to you after such a long-time, so I hope you are in good health hey?

Welshman Ncube (WN): I am very well and in very good health Gibbs and I hope you are too.

GD: Yes I am in good health. Now professor you have been quiet after the elections, tell us why are you so quiet?

WN: But! Look ehhh! We went to an election Gibbs, an election which the party I lead prepared for quite thoroughly from our congress for almost 2 and a half years. We were in the communities, we were in the campaign trail, we were building the party. We covered literally every bled of Zimbabwean grass in our effort to mobilise people to vote for us.

Historically, we had been at this since the formation of the MDC in early 2000 and we lost yet again in an election almost 13 years since the formation of the MDC. And, we could not just get up the following day and keep doing the same old things we had been doing for 13 years and which had not delivered victory or success on the promises of the working people's convention.

Clearly this required in our view, moments of reflection, careful reflection, careful analysis, stating back what is it that we did wrong, what is it that made us not gel with the people? What is it that we should do differently. In my view, to just continue wake up and continue do the same old things we had done for 13 years to no avail will not be dissimilar to what mentally challenged people do when you go to Ingutsheni and they give you a bucket of water with holes at the bottom and they keep asking you to go and fetch water you reach the destination it is empty. You keep doing the same thing. I think that is a bit insane if we had continued to do that. That is why we stepped back and have been reflecting, we consulting our structures, consulting people as to what we could do differently. So it was not a silence we said we were opting out of the political contestation. It is a "silence" to say we can't continue to do the same things. We need to be thoughtful, we need to be careful.

GD: You are saying that you were almost not "hibernating" but strategising behind the scenes. So at the end of the day what really happened, what have you gathered to indicate that you lost the elections because of A,B,C?

WN: Well, what seems clear to us is that the biggest challenge we face as a opposition political party, the biggest challenge we face as the MDC which stands for the things we stand for which stands for a complete overhaul of the sort of governance that we have seen over the last 34 odd years is that our people have got to a stage where they have a difficulty in relating their condition in life to the government that they must elect.

You have a situation where a person goes to vote for ZANU PF today and the following day he looks for me to say I have no food, I have no fees for my school children and you have a conversation and the mindset is as if you have an obligation to go and put a government which has no responsibility to you and which you expect to deliver nothing to you. And this is in my view is the dilemma that we face, how we can reach out to our people for people to understand that a government they elect is a government which has a responsibility to deliver an improvement on their lives, progress in their lives rather than to be there for the sake of being there and for the benefit of those that they elect. That is the challenge that we face.

But more importantly, more importantly, it is clear to us that the energy, the momentum, the impetus that the Democratic Movement had in 2000 when the generality of democrats in Zimbabwe came together from civil society, from politics to say we have a certain common denominator around which we agreed. That momentum has been eroded over the last 13 odd years. The things that bound us together when we went to the working people's convention in 2000 we have betrayed each other along the way. It was all too easy for us to have a rhetorical theoretical commitment to those democratic ideas. And regrettably over the last 13 we have demonstrated that amongst us there were those who sort power for the sake of power and were not really in reality committed to the things we said were contained in the agenda for change. And this explains the continued fragmentation of the opposition to Mugabe because not all of us had genuine and sincere commitment to a completely different form of governance, a completely different form of politics as well as economic management.

It is as if some of us simply say "ahhhh as long as I am not Mugabe, as long as I have not made people poor, I can mimic all the ZANU ills about governance and politics it matters not". And this is what has led to the fragmentation of the opposition. What we now need, what we now need is a realignment, a coming together in my view of all those democrats whether they are trapped in undemocratic parties or whether they are disillusioned and are inactive or whether they are still in the struggle fighting lone battles. We need to recapture the energy, the momentum, the impetus of 2000 or 1999 for us to be able to once again regroup and fight ZANU PF to victory.

If we don't do that, if we continue to do the same thing, to fight from our little corners we will get nowhere. If we continue to tolerate deviations from the values and principles that made us or that bound us together at the beginning we have no chance in my view of actually dislodging the sort of regime that runs Zimbabwe today.