Biti not too amused with Tsvangirai at the helm

The chickens are surely coming home to roost!

For a long time, the opposition MDC-T led by Morgan Tsvangirai has been putting on a brave face and stating publicly that it would win the next elections that are scheduled for 2018.

Tsvangirai has traversed the length and breadth of the country - pretty much so since 2013. He has been visible enough, but many serious analysts have doubted his capacity to recover from the crushing loss he suffered in the last elections, in 2013, in which President Mugabe handed him a massive defeat of 61 to 34 percent in the Presidential poll, while in the parliamentary poll the margin was similarily high.

It was a reverse of the 2008 elections in which Tsvangirai narrowly won in the first round, albeit without sufficient majority, before chickening out of the run-off.

The results had also produced a hung Parliament.

Many had believed that the inclusive Government – the so-called power-sharing arrangement – would be the chance for Tsvangirai "to take power from within".

He failed dismally.

Yet, Tsvangirai's backers and sympathisers were not very harsh on him.

They even invented some comforting lies about rigging allegedly done with the help of a company called Nikuv.

There were further lies around assisted voters, with the British Ambassador to Zimbabwe at the time, a Deborrah Bronnert, completely making a fool of her poor self by repeating vacuous claims by the opposition.

She later withdrew her remarks.

We are not sure what happened to her thereafter.

Still on claims of electoral fraud, who can forget Tendai Biti's claims that West Africans - from Sudan, wasn't it - had been bussed in to vote in Mt Pleasant?

The lies all fell flat and the opposition itself, and Biti in particular, would admit that they had lost to better opponents.

Admit privately or in rare moments of candour, that is.

Lies have short legs.

But they were able to cushion Tsvangirai – and still do to this day.

However, with another election on the horizon – we can go polling nine months from now – there are very uneasy questions regarding the suitability of Morgan Tsvangirai to run again when it is plain to all that, beyond the self-serving and comforting lie that he has been living, he faces the dim prospect of losing again.

More heavily, in fact.

Think tanks and academics and pollsters are sensing, nay, feeling this prospect.

It is palpable.

What is worse is the realisation that not only is Tsvangirai going to lose; he is also going to run out of excuses.

Angry Alex

Tsvangirai's backers at home and in the West will look stupid.

This is where Alex Magaisa, an academic and consultant, as well as a "public intellectual" comes in.

He has previously worked as advisor to Tsvangirai and it is believed that he was sent by the British to guide Tsvangirai during the days of the inclusive Government where Tsvangirai was prime minister.

Much as he does not show it, Magaisa is an angry man principally because he will always be associated with Tsvangirai – Tsvangirai the failure.

It is for this reason that he is angry that the party is not ready for elections and has tried to find flimsy excuses such as raising concern over the awarding of the BVR tender to a Chinese company.

Magaisa is seeing through all this.

Not only is the excuse flimsy, it is also self-defeating.

The Daily News a couple of days ago placed this into context, saying the opposition faced "mutually conflicting" messages in its election narrative.

It noted that time was "running out" and the opposition "needed to decide whether it should keep fighting with authorities over the BVR kits or send messages of hope to the electorate if the party entertained hopes of winning next year's make-or-break elections".

Tsvangirai was in a Catch-22 situation.

This is what the paper told us.

And Magaisa realises just how gravely uninspiring and confusing the opposition is to its electorate.

The MDC-T is being driven to hopelessness and apathy.

"Why waste time queueing up to register and to vote when there is no hope of winning?" Magaisa queries.

"This is why the opposition leaders must invest more in hope and drop their energy-sapping public statements. The more they moan that Zanu-PF has rigged the BVR selection process, the less motivated potential voters become. What's the point of going to register to vote if the process is already rigged?"

One thing is clear from this: not only is the opposition poised to lose; all honest people will not buy the dog-ate-my-homework story!

Another headache

It gets worse. There had been hope that Tsvangirai's prospects could be significantly boosted by the formation of the so-called grand coalition to which the MDC-T leader has been inviting others in the hope of shoring numbers – and hope.

However, it is not a fiat yet.

The coalition may, in fact, never materialise.

Joice Mujuru wants to lead it.

Tendai Biti is not too amused with Tsvangirai at the helm.

Tsvangirai's supporters are against the coalition and pretty soon we may see them engaged in fights with Mujuru's supporters.

Thokhozani Khupe and Nelson Chamisa have formed an alliance to scupper the coalition, we hear.

It is not in black and white.

Meanwhile, Tsvangirai is not well.

His health is slowly deteriorating – or at least by what we are seeing in recent pictures.

That in itself adds an interesting dimension.