Nine Lives of a Democrat, A Journey to New Zimbabwe Post 2013

Background 
Every political party and its supporters need to rise again and retain their relevance in the political sphere especially after losing an election in circumstances that they cannot clearly define nor understand. Those parties with genuine and legitimate followership will rise and fight again, whilst those without may suffer eminent death. However the ability to rise and pick up pieces, includes the membership's trust and belief in the party and its leadership or connection of the party to both the exogenous and endogenous influence playing out in the political economy of the country. The loss might force the party to take a ruthless introspection if they don't consider other causes to the loss such as violence, electoral manipulation and fear of the electorate to express their right to choose their leaders. The same hash judgment can be done by the international community on the said party, but not so obvious is true with the electorate which knows exactly who and how they voted and sadly lost.

Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) was not immune to such a scenario and up to date hasn't fully recovered from the 2013 harmonized election loss and the reaction that came its way  both internally and externally.   The major blame on MDC-T's loss shifted from a clearly stolen election to the leader of the party who was an equal victim of a fraudulent electoral system. Instead of finding out what caused the loss or the mysterious 1 million new ZANU(PF) votes amid massive opposition support and Government of National Unity performance. Some politicians within MDC-T leadership took advantage of the situation and to tried and topple its leader Morgan Tsvangirai from power claiming he had lost 'too many' elections and is now beyond his sale by date.

Joining the Fragmented Dots
The first visible fragmentation of the MDC-T was seen when the former Secretary General, Tendai Biti and Deputy Treasurer General Elton Mangoma together with a few members of Parliament failed a coup de ta on Tsvangirai and went on to form their own party, People's Democratic Party (PDP) which later on split with Elton leading a splinter group called Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe (RDZ).  Whilst this was happening Tsvangirai was in the middle of trying to regroup his party, reenergize the electorate and reconnecting with traditional allies in the labor movement, civil society, the Church, international community and the peasants amongst many other sectors.

His first strategic stop was engaging the Church  who in past had played a critical role in the church-civil society network during the Magaret Dongo's election victory against the late Vivian Mwashita in Sunningdale, the constitutional reform agenda and the Save Zimbabwe Campaign that made it possible for the SADC negotiations to take place, amongst many other church led political processes. He then requested retired Bishop Sebastian Bakare who had been key in most of these initiatives to lead a project that would see Zimbabweans coming together at a common platform and be able to regain confidence to continue with the democratic fight that had been temporarily stolen by ZANU(PF).

Bishop Bakare agreed to the idea, but requested  for a semi-autonomy operation plan in terms of how he was going to implement the idea. Tsvangirai concurred.  Given the blank cheque, the man of clothe, identified one academia  and political author , Ibboston Joseph Mandaza to help him in crafting the idea into action. Given that this was after the split of the MDC-T, Ibbo found an opportunity of ensuring that this was the only way of making his cousin and fast politically sinking Tendai Biti relevant since his PDP had suffered a huge vote of no confidence from both the electorate and major international funders. Bishop Bakare then increased his levels of autonomy by sidelining Tsvangirai on what was happening within the set initiative by allowing Ibbo to give him technical team made up of a pro Tendai Biti team some who had worked for the MDC-T before the split.  The vision shifted from coming up with the National Convergence Platform (NCP) as originally agreed  between Tsvangirai and Bakare, to a 'people's platform' that would not only elect a new political leader but also form a new people's party most likely to be led by Tendai Biti as by this time PDP had not been formed. This was the Ibbo-Biti-Bakare axis of sidelining Tsvangirai.

Imaginary Authority
Having realized this, Tsvangirai and his party were not devoid of new ideas. He pulled out of the NCP agenda and set up Zimbabwe National Agreement Platform (ZiNAP) led by another clergy Bishop Ancellom Magaya, but not before he realized the potential conflict between the two platforms.  He made an effort to try and see how the two can work together with no luck as Bakare literally stripped Bishop Magaya questioning his religious status standing and qualifications as a Bishop and declaring that NCP was his brain child and thus it could not be 'contaminated' by an MDC-T agenda nor an unordained Bishop. The two platforms went to exist separately  albeit with not much national impact.

Ibbo having seen the collapse the NCP which he thought a new breed of political leadership minus Tsvangirai was going to be presented to Zimbabweans, went on and started a new duplicate initiative to NCP, the National Transitional Authority(NTA) only that this NTA will be political but led by a non 'political' individual. Part of its mission highlighted that:
"The creation of the NTA will require national convergence among all stakeholders. In this regard, it is important for ZANU PF, with its faulty majority from the contested 2013 electoral outcome to put national interests first and give Zimbabwe a chance. Equally it is incumbent upon exhausted players in opposition parties to stand aside and give Zimbabwe a chance." (own emphasis)

This NTA immediately and coincidentally got a major buy in from the who is who in the intellectual society. Tendai Biti strategically supported it given that he believed in Ibbo and that he did not represent ZANU(PF) nor the "exhausted player in the opposition". Here was a 'new' political player with a new party that was less than a year old! The NTA clearly came out in the open unlike the NCP, that Morgan Tsvangirai was the target of how these intellectuals and elites wanted to define future politics of Zimbabwe.
 
What Ibbo and company did not realize  was that Zimbabwe as a nation was not yet ripe for this superficial elite arrangement to their politics. Politics in Zimbabwe still resonate around political parties with elections (whether stolen or not) giving mandate to the national leadership.  Tendai Biti's involvement in the NTA, was to ensure that PDP becomes the political soft landing for NTA making Tendai Biti and PDP playing the 'technical brains behind the scene' role laterally making NTA report to PDP . However, Ibbo later realized  that NTA was not as popular as he had imagined  as he indicated in his interview with Violet Gonda where he said "they have been most opposed to it (NTA) the opposition parties. And for good reason – they are not interested in reforms; they want to get back into power, back into office, back into salaries and state cars.  That's all they want." [link]

However Ibbo promised that a conference which coincided with Nkosaba Moyo's political party launch, was held which was not be an NTA launch, but a convergence on national dialogue to deal with the transitional crisis!

The Reform Agenda Principle
Unlike what Ibbo said in the above interview, Tsvangirai was seized with moving away from the lost election preoccupation to a reform agenda beyond elections, but through his visionary Transformational Agenda plan of action. The Transformational Agenda included calls for electoral, institutional, economic and governance reforms.  An initial step was the electoral advocacy framework, Without Reforms No Elections (WreNE) at party level which was later sold to other 13 political parties as National Electoral Reform Agenda (NERA). Thus, Tsvangirai was more concerned by conditions  where citizen will enjoy the right to choose their own leadership in a free and fair environment and not on positions or elitist frameworks such as NTA.

With an impulsive response and not understanding the core objectives of NERA  as  an exclusively  electoral reform platform, Tendai Biti  went on in the company of other opposition leaders,  created Coalition of Democrats (CODE) which they wanted to be in competition  with NERA in the buildup of a pre election coalition.  Not only did they reach out to amongst the political parties, Simba Makoni's MKD,  Welshman Ncube's MDC, Dumiso Dabengwa's ZAPU and Elton Mangoma's RDZ, they also went on to fish out NERA members in the Form of Farai Mbira's ZUNDE and Dzikiti's DARE in an effort to weaken the Tsvangirai led initiative. Besides Simba Makoni and Dumiso Dabengwa, CODE was largely made up of former MDC-T members making it a more personal focus than objectivity. The two mutual members (ZUNDE and DARE) acted as a medium of information leakages between the two platforms making it an added advantage for CODE than for NERA in terms of information gaps.

The Dotito Effect
Tsvangirai as the person who was given the mandate by his National Council which is the highest decision making body between congresses, to deal with all issues pertaining to negotiations and coalitions, made it clear that MDC-T will negotiate bilaterally and not multilaterally, but also reserves the right to negotiate with individuals who MDC-T felt added value to the proposed coalition. MDC-T started  to engage with ZimPF in mid 2016 and later on publicly signed MOUs with Joice Mujuru's NPP, Welshman Ncube's MDC with others  pending with  other parties such as Transform Zimbabwe(TZ).  As this was  shaping up, those opposed to Tsvangirai's leadership and at the backdrop of a weak CODE given the Welshman's brave stance, went on to bring up again the NTA-CODE hybrid  that would identify once again a 'non exhausted leader' to lead the coalition. A meeting took place in Cape Town where an MOU was drafted with an unwritten statement pointing at a Nkosana Moyo leadership. This platform was called Mass of Opposition Movement (MOM).  However to the surprise of many political analysts, MDC and PDP did not sign the MOU, with MDC-T and NPP either not even invited or invited, but not on time to travel and attend.  Within 48 hours of returning into Zimbabwe the same parties who participated under MOM, but now as CODE led by MDC and PDP held a review meeting cum feedback meeting to which they agreed to abandon the MOM strategy since it was not home grown and lacked home based legitimacy. Because of the glaring absence of Mujuru and Tsvangirai in Cape Town, CODE resolved to join up with NERA and be able to bring the coalition agenda to NERA since it had more political traction given the presence of MDC-T and NPP. The hidden strategy was to vote as a block for a coalition leader once they get to that stage and use this 'democratic' process to sideline Tsvangirai and at least propose their Cape Town target of Nkosana Moyo. This platform later on became known as ZINERA.

On another front, Priscilla Misihairambwi Mushonga who had played a role in linking up  the then ZimPF and MDC after some Dubai meeting with Joice Banda the former Malawian President, later on exposed herself when she  publicly bought into the NTA agenda of having an 'independent' leader of the coalition.  When the NTA died a still birth, she started an initiative together with MDC-T's Thokozani Khupe and Joice Mujuru,  to mobilse women voters for the 2018 elections yet in real terms it is mobilising for a female candidate. Her swing from the NTA idea to this 'women mobilisation' clearly proves that she will not motivate the women to vote for Tsvangirai candidacy. Whilst this platform is largely dominated by MDC-T women, it remains a mystery how Priscilla would wish to turn the same women against their leader especially in the presence of his immediate subordinate.

The Rising Physics Ghost
Analyzing the NCP and its DNA within the body politic of the so called pro democracy movement one common agenda can be seen. That Tsvangirai has been under attack from his own erstwhile siblings. The artificial collapse of CODE into ZINERA that is if they even respect ZINERA enough not to contaminate it by faking alliance, the unheard life of MOM post Cape Town indaba  and the introduction of coalition debate within ZINERA pauses new threats on Morgan Tsvangirai as group thinking and voting puts him into the minority.

It is coming to the ears of this writer that ZINERA after the Masvingo meeting actually wants to identify a leader of the coalition in the form of Nkosana Moyo a physics lecturer and if it hapwns to be Morgan Tsvangirai then come up with a new coalition name  thereby striping him of his traditional connection with MDC-T.  Nkosana Moyo is likely going to come to Zimbabwe  soon to launch his party. This is as a response to the resistance of a non partisan leader to lead the coalition. With the challenge of not having any political structures in the country, but with a lot of money, it is alleged that the mass resignation of NPP members is due to them being nocodimasly being recruited into the proposed new party.

The move by Joice Mujuru to CODE proves that she is now weaker to challenge Tsvangirai for coalition leadership and going to CODE  is simply because it gives her the opportunity to lead as a coalition leader buy abusing her liberation war credentials and an imagined membership which is better than the other CODE members. This it is imagined, will pause a challenge to whatever Tsvangirai remains with at NERA, but little does Mujuru know that those behind the scenes in CODE actually do not believe in her, but have milked her membership to support Nkosana Moyo.  The carrot strategy to bring Joice Mujuru  to CODE was made clear when  block strategy made  Tsvangirai who was the then convener of NERA at the time ZINERA was formed, be relegated to be chair of the Diplomatic Committee whilst Mujuru chairs the populist and strategic Political Committee responsible for  national outreach. Automatically Mujuru will become the face of the coalition whilst Tsvangirai globe trots. Unfortunately the electorate hasn't been responding well in these joint rallies either under NERA or ZINERA. Doubts still remain when similar activities are done under CODE.

The coming in of Nkosana Moyo would mean eventually those who always wanted him or anyone else but Tsvangirai, would push poor Mujuru out at the 11th hour of going to the polls, giving ZANU(PF) credit in the process something that might work for Tsvangirai but mainly for ZANU(PF) as the former is too broke to come up with a strong election campaign with a year remaining to the ballot. These massive defections from NPP purportedly to yet to be launched Nkosana Moyo led party would mean that Mujuru will be too weak to lead the coalition as those who always wanted Nkosana Moyo and lack confidence inthemselves would rally their membership to join his party so as to justify his coalition leadership. Not to be be outdone will be the group of young social media driven activists and some who used to belong to the now defunct social movements who will rush to be associated with Nkosana Moyo, whether for money or for nation building that question remains to be answered.

Wither Bob Tricks?
With all this happening, and pointing fingers, let Zimbabweans not be fooled that the shrewd ZANU(PF) has been sleeping on the job. Yes with its own implosion,  ZANU(PF) has not diverted from its mantra that "Tsvangirai will never lead this country". This rhetoric was managed to be sold to Joice Mujuru by certain sections of the securocrats who dangled the 'transfere of power' carrot. Mujuru was fooled that for her to be the next president she must discard Tsvangirai and the process of forming an election pact with MDC-T.  To the shock of many avid supporters of a pre election coalition, Joice Mujuru came out in the public and questioned Tsvangirai's capacity to lead the coalition given that "some in the army and the policy would be worried that if someone becomes the president then they will lose their farms or will be punished for what they did in the past so they will be more comfortable having one of their on leading." Like hearing it from the ZANU(PF), Joice all of a sudden realized that Tsvangirai had no liberation credentials, ignored that he publicly stated that the land reform was irreversible and MDC-T will respect the constitution. Joice was quick to forget that Tsvangirai had assured the security sector and War veterans that their future and welfare was guaranteed under his leadership. Joice Mujuru swallowed the ZANU(PF) propaganda hook line and sinker and the ZANU(PF)'s strategy to stop Tsvangirai found a ready buyer.

What has also made this strategy popular was  through George Charamba's Nathaniel Manheru Column who has been consistant that Joice Mujuru's presidency or the coalition with Tsvangirai were never going to see the light of day. From the look of things, this will soon be a reality. ZANU(PF) has done a very good job of infiltrating Mujuru's project even to the highest level at the then ZimPF whilst sustaining its moles in MDC-T. ZimPF was a strong and confidence builder to the electorate as a potential coalition partner for any party. It chose a far more powerful partner in MDC-T. Then there was a split, making the remainder of ZimPF led by Dydimus Mutasa and Rugare Gumbo (the later never really liked Tsvangirai) to struggle to make any national impact. It later on split with Bhasikiti and Mutambara going their own way.

Whilst the NPP carried with it an irresistible brand in the form of Joice Mujuru by being both a liberation war hero and a woman, she was not strategic on how to create a winning team that does not carry with it past life spirits.  However ZANU(PF) followed her in her new project after seeing the party signing an MOU with MDC-T.  A sworn anti Tsvangirai one  Siphepa Nkomo found himself as one of her Vice Presidents. This is Siphepa who left MDC-t together with his wife for Biti's PDP. When he found himself not getting the powerful post he wished for within PDP, he left to join Joice Mujuru who was signing an MOU with the same Tsvangirai. This is the same case with one Max Mkandhla who left MDC-T for PDP then to NPP before becoming the proposed spokes person for Nkosana Moyo. This 360 degrees circus by some of these individual proves how ZANU(PF) has infiltrated the pro democracy movement in its quest to tray and stop Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC-T.

Whether the ZINERA in its bulkiness , Nkosana Moyo or the MDC defectors-centric anti Morgan Tsvangirai are independent or immune of ZANU(PF)'s global strategy, is still to be proved in a short term period. Tsvangirai can be credited for giving his adversaries a long rope.  However, what has happened is that it has made NPP a very weak coalition partner with MDC-T and not so viable within the CODE setting where a preferred candidate is already on cards.  This will make the ZANU(PF) agenda of ensuring that going into the next election there won't be any serious coalition to talk about, and in fact if there is any, it will be fragmented allowing ZANU(PF) to face a lone Tsvangirai, rig and  win the next election.  Finishing off the rich democratic dream in the process.

Conclusion
As Zimbabwe just commemorated the epitome of Mugabe's desire to stay in power on 27 June when in 2008 he contested in a election alone after butchering more than 300 MDC-T supporters in the full glare of Joice Mujuru, as the nation's  politics unfold towards the watershed election in 2018, it is critical that Zimbabweans understand who has been the real enemy of the people and also who has been the pillar with nine lives in the quest of seeing a democratic developmental State in the post independence republic.  What Morgan Tsvangirai represents is what many people have appreciated and expressed it through their vote,  whilst  a few choose to ignore including those who started this people's project. His resonance with the people, his leadership of a political movement with a pool of diverging personalities and views has made him to look at these fights against him as part of a struggle not competition of personalities led by elitists not disregarding his personal faults and limitations.

It is the hope of many free thinking and peace loving Zimbabweans that the strongest coalition remains embedded in the original MDC of 1999. That what has been shown by Welshman trickle to his learned friend and comrade Tendai Biti's mind of minds and hearts of hearts to forgive and put Zimbabweans at the centre of this struggle. As we think of our future as a people, let us open our politically wide shut eyes and mind, remember the journey travelled and ensure that the struggle must be led by the people's choice!

Chana ChaVatete is a Zimbabwean writing in her personal capacity and her views do not represent that of any organization.