Chamisa's MDC must wake up before it's too late

READING through the biography of Chris Hani, one cannot help but notice the frustration that he went through during his days in exile in Zambia, where the ANC was preparing the Umkhonto weSizwe guerillas to be deployed to the front in South Africa.

The leadership seemed reluctant to deploy the energetic youths to the front, but let them starve in camps, at times to death. This is one of the reasons which when reading through I am convinced it delayed the liberation of South Africa from apartheid.

While the MDC exists in different times and the circumstances are different as the party is not considering war or at war, it has an inescapable task of confronting this Zanu-PF regime in the streets and using all constitutional and democratic means to stop the worsening economic situation of our people, before it is too late.

The people look up to this movement as a real political alternative to Zanu-PF. The masses stand ready for that call, which President Nelson Chamisa pledged he would make at the MDC's 2019 congress. He promised he would lead the masses towards economic prosperity and reclaim their electoral victory from Zanu-PF theft.

The MDC seems either absent or taking too long to take up the task.

The danger of the MDC procrastination to take to the streets is that it will frustrate Zimbabweans to a point of giving up on it and the unintended consequence is that it will  give Zanu-PF a chance to reinvent itself through one of its factions like the path the Zanu-PF youth league seems to be taking where it wants to create a picture of their party doing something about corruption, yet painful lessons of history, some of them very recent, show that its about a chance on the feeding trough, not the desires of  the general populace.

We may not in the distant future find people thronging the streets celebrating this cosmetic changes with no value as Zanu-PF project itself as the savior in the crisis that they have worked so hard to create for close to four decades.

One of the dangerous things to ever do as a political entity, is to create a vacuum in politics, a party must always be heard and seen to be in pursuit of providing answers to the desires of the constituency that it leads, especially in times of these  economic collapse in our motherland.

The MDC must be at the forefront of exposing corruption in Zanu-PF, this corruption that stinks to high heavens, the MDC's silence is quite deafening and disappointing.

One would have expected the party to be leading the protests, going to the courts and approaching all other institutions that are established in our constitution to expose this corruption, but unfortunately the movement seems to be choosing silence while the Zimbabweans are shot changed daily.

Now the architects of corruption and their off springs want to play messiah to the evil they gave birth to.

Unemployment in the country, is now estimated to be around 90 %, the private sector is on intensive care, the public workers receiving insults as salaries for their loyal service to the country, while the political connected and dealers contributing nothing to the national purse are drowning in riches, this surely must inspire the movement that was born out of workers struggles to take the lead and liberate the workers from this exploitation.

The glorious movement of Morgan Tsvangirai and Gibson Sibanda must find its voice, it must take leadership in this struggle, and the people voted for it overwhelmingly, it can't absolve itself from the responsibility to lead from the front.

This silent movement is not the one that Fletcher Dulini Ncube and Isaac Matongo were prepared to lay their lives for, Susan Tsvangirai and Zodwa Sibanda must be turning in their graves seeing this silence, silence that may be mistaken for complicity and complacency.

The party must learn from history, not long ago Pastor Evans Mawarire almost took away the thunder had it not been for his strategic blunders it could have been another story, in January this year a demonstration that was initiated by unknown forces almost took people to total freedom but sadly lives where lost as the regime crashed the peoples voice with military might, but lesson from history some of it still fresh, show that such force doesn't last forever.

My submission is that the MDC must wake up, it must not at this point be seen not to be doing anything about this national crisis, the people are so tired of Zanu-PF and their desperation to get out of the chaos can be seen in their faces from any direction, and the MDC has a duty to lead, before either a third force emerges or Zanu-PF for its own greed reinvents itself and the people's victory is delayed.

Gifford Mehluli Sibanda is a villager in rural Matabeleland North