Opinion / Columnist
MDC and Zapu - Redacted by the Electorate, Silenced from Crying!
04 Aug 2013 at 11:39hrs | Views
MDC leader Prof Welshman Ncube cast his vote at Stanley Hall in Makokoba Bulawayo, ZAPU leader Dr Dumiso Dabengwa cast his vote at Fourwinds polling station
Am I the only one worried?
In a time of national crisis as this, when the heavy boot of power is tramping the sovereign, where are MDC and ZAPU?
Where are their voices, their actions? Is this really the time to be telling us what they are not going to do or why they are not going to do it, as MDC did with their ill-thought out Statement they released yesterday [03 August 2013], when what is required most now is leadership – and leadership from the front?
Could it be the case then that Zapu, redacted by the just-ended election, has instantaneously evaporation even as an idea?
To their credit, Zapu raised the issue of possible fraud before the elections, before the event. In the event, however, the event has come and gone and delivered a crisis, yet Zapu now appears never to have had any intention to exist outside a wishful framework of being 'kingmakers' or 'king-breakers' after what they were sure was going to be a stalemate between Zanu-PF and MDC-T.
It's obvious, they were pre-read and pre-empted, by a fraud, as now alleged, and as Zapu itself sought to show well before the elections. So why this silence in the middle of such an unfolding crisis?
It is now fact that the whole dynamic has changed, the whole narrative reconfigured. Zanu-PF is now the ruling party, which is now ruling a crisis-free Zimbabwe.
Or is it so?
If it is not, and MDC-T are saying it is not, is it Zapu and MDC's positions that they are now free-riders on MDC-T's position on the crisis, or simply that they will lead from the back? And both Zapu and MDC wonder why, even possibly without the alleged rigging, the electorate itself is happy to redact them?
How do you form a political party precisely not to win power and expect to have serious followers or supporters, let alone voters, when even the people of Matebeleland, on whose tired shoulders and unacknowledged grief they have sought to ride, want change? To be exact, when they want Mugabe out? For now!
Are Zapu and MDC's positions – of deafening silence -- in a time of serious crisis as this, then, a tacit acknowledgment of a fate that they know should long have been exacted on them by the people of Matebeleland a long time ago?
Have they been suppressing the true desire of the people of Matebeleland all along? Do they feel exposed by this election, and, therefore, now politically disabled even from pretending to cry on their behalf (the people of Matebeleland)?
No one doubts the arrogance of MDC-T, for which they are rightly getting the stick from the public for this fiasco. MDC-T deserve to be getting their lesson in humility. But that is a wider moral lesson for arm-chair critics like me to highlight. But for opposition political parties like Zapu and MDC, supposedly equally aggrieved and hurt by the alleged electoral fraud perpetrated by Zanu-PF on the people of Zimbabwe, that should be no consideration now, if indeed it is.
If a crisis like this won't make Zapu and MDC close ranks with MDC-T, as presently seems the case, then the opposition cause is as good as dead, whether or not all political parties were cheated. At least MDC-T is crying foul, and publicly, and in the face of Zapu and MDC's failure to even cry! Even if Zapu and MDC start mourning now, as they most likely will, it is coming too little, too late.
MDC-T are far from being political saints. MDC-T would in all probability have lost on account of their own blunders (it's the scale of rigging at issue here, rigging being a given), but for Zapu and MDC to fail to coalesce into a 'coalition of the cheated' with MDC-T so late into the crisis, is wholly unforgivable.
MDC-T might not admit it publicly, but they are now humbled.
They now need friends, solidarity. The last thing MDC need now is reliance on their own faulted previous 'wisdom', or their now coloured judgment, or their now heavily compromised capacity to navigate the thick fog of 'loss'. They need friends to offer their 'good offices' and help them mend bridges and friends to help them recover the political goodwill of those they have offended in the run-up to the elections. They need solidarity for strength and assurance. They deserve all of these because, unlike Zapu and MDC on the present showing, they at least feel wronged; cheated.
The very least Zapu and MDC should do in this crisis, and should have done already, unless they do not believe they have been cheated, is just to cry: foul, as MDC-T are doing and have done as soon as the fraud became apparent!!!
And Zapu and MDC's apparent failure to acknowledge the people's sense of loss and political bereavement, when the very voice of complaint and redress would be soothing, cannot be justified.
Where are Zapu and MDC in this unfolding crisis?
Source - Martin Mlevu
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