Open letter to MDC-T president, Morgan Tsvangirai

Dear Mr Morgan Tsvangirai,

We are KMNC – Kingdom of Matebeleland National Congress. We represent and speak on behalf of the 'hidden' People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland. We are not formal representatives, in the sense of 'elected' representatives. You may therefore regard us as representing the hidden or suppressed truth about the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland, speaking the publicly-known but the publicly unsaid about the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland.

Please accept this Open Letter we are addressing to you in your capacity as President of MDC-T.
Our message in this this Open Letter is hopefully short and crisp.

We are writing to you specifically to appeal and urge you and your Party to withdraw your signature to the Copac Final Draft Constitution which you and your Party have signed up to and which is due to be presented to present-day Zimbabwe's Parliament this week. We are urging you and your Party to take this action now, and before the Parliamentary motions in respect of it begin, specifically so that such an action can re-trigger a political process that will, firstly, kill off this Copac Final Draft Constitution as a document, and, secondly, trigger a political process that will kill off the GPA as a process and usher in a fresh, genuine, open and publicly-accountable transitional political process involving all the People of what is presently called Zimbabwe. We do not believe that anyone needs comment that the GPA process, and its political off-spring of the Inclusive Government, has been an unmitigated and unqualified failure. The Copac Final Draft Constitution is therefore just a political indictment sheet on the GPA and Inclusive Government.

We therefore believe, as KMNC and the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland, that things need to move on from this failed GPA process - whose role was never political transition but economic rescue - and move on to a truly political transition process. The obstacle to that new political transition process has become this Copac Final Draft Constitution. Thankfully, it is not yet law and can, with your withdrawal, be prevented from ever becoming the supreme law.

We all know how the Copac Final Draft Constitution has come to be a 'final' document; you and your Party are privy to that. We will therefore spare you and your Party further discomfort. We record here only what the Copac Final Draft Constitution is.

As you no doubt know, the document now about to be presented to Parliament as the Copac Final Draft Constitution is in fact a political document of deceit, calculated to deceive and calculated to subvert the People and calculated to pervert international criminal justice. This is what you and your Party have signed off as the Copac Final Draft Constitution. We know you and your Party know that.  

We are also afraid that the political compromises of which all the parties involved in this Copac Final Draft Constitution speak – except Zanu-PF - is just seen by the public as an excuse for political betrayal. Those who have now recruited you and your Party to be traitors to a public cause for genuine freedom for all are virtually political goners. You and your Party still have a political future to think of. We urge you and your Party to re-think.

On this occasion, we urge you and your Party to turn, to change your mind. On this occasion, it will be the right turn, the right change of mind. The changes that are in the future – which will no doubt come - must find you and your Party on the right side of change, and as part of the makers of that change. With this Copac Final Draft Constitution you have acted for change only so you can stop change.

As KMNC and the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland we believe that your and your Party's action in signing up to the so-called 'deal' in the first place, and, ultimately, to  the Copac Final Draft Constitution, is the result of a false choice, a politically enforced choice.

You and your Party do not and have never needed to choose between the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland and the People of Mashonaland. We have watched in utter horror as you and your Party have laboured to make that choice and take as your own somebody else's self-inflicted political problems. Such a choice belongs to Zanu-PF, but, as Zanu-PF has discovered, such a choice leads straight to jail, and, as Zanu-PF now knows, this is a choice that creates and makes political miscreants of adults. And it's also a choice that means turning the State into a vicious machinery for defending lies and for harbouring fugitives from justice. With this Copac Final Draft Constitution, which is a creation of power not popular legitimacy, you and your Party have chosen to be Zanu-PF and act as if you were Zanu-PF which must make such a choice.

You and your Party have never needed to make a choice. You and your Party have only needed to for political justice, for that is what democracy ultimately is about - whatever the outcome for such political justice.

To this day, you and your Party say the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland are your political stronghold. That political stronghold said in its submissions to the Copac outreach process that it wanted devolution. You and your Party fell over each other to promise that you would deliver that devolution, yet you and your Party know full well that the Copac Final Draft Constitution has totally removed devolution – via a secretive process you and your Party participated in - and which secretive process was intended to take the decision over devolution away from that political stronghold because that stronghold should not have devolution, according to Zanu-PF.

You and your Party know what you have just done to the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland. But let us not waste valuable time on that and see if we can move things forward here.

True devolution can only come via a Referendum by the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland, as you and your Party know. The Copac Final Draft Constitution does not offer such a Referendum and therefore there is no devolution offered in the Copac Final Draft Constitution. That being a known fact now, and the submissions of the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland now being a matter of public knowledge, are you and your Party now prepared to admit that the Copac Final Draft Constitution does not represent the views of the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland on devolution and withdraw your and your Party's consent to the Final Draft before it is presented to Parliament?

In that event, would you and your Party be prepared instead to offer, sponsor and campaign for the Kingdom of Matebeleland Act as an Act that will provide for a Kingdom of Matebeleland Referendum and related mechanisms?

Assuming that you and your Party do not act to withdraw your consent to the Copac Final Draft Constitution before it is 'debated' in Parliament and it finally becomes the Constitution, would you and your Party still be prepared to support the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland get the Kingdom of Matebeleland Act that will still offer such a Referendum post- the Copac Constitution?

As you and your Party know, the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland who speak of devolution are the few who work within the formal structures and processes of present-day Zimbabwe and who wish to circumnavigate Zimbabwe's labyrinth of anti-Ndebele acts and activities. The majority, the hidden lot whom KMNC represents and speaks for, want independence of the Kingdom of Matebeleland.

Would you and your Party be prepared to offer and support the Kingdom of Matebeleland Independence Act which will provide for an Independence Referendum of the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland?

As KMNC and the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland, we now have a further concern. Can you and your Party assure and re-assure KMNC and the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland that you have not acted conspiratorially with Zanu-PF precisely as a pre-emptive political strike against the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland to prevent and frustrate the impending independence of the Kingdom of Matebeleland?

And what is your and your Party's position on Gukurahundi? Should it be punished at all?

Should the Copac Final Draft Constitution refer to it in its Preamble or not? Should the Copac Final Draft Constitution devote a whole Chapter to Gukurahundi or not?
Finally, your Party was elected on a mandate to oppose Zanu-PF. This deceitful political document coming in the clothes of a constitution – now called the Copac Final Draft Constitution – will have turned you and your Party into Zanu-PF. Have the past 10 years all been so that you and your Party can re-create and re-invent Zanu-PF - stronger?
Can it be really true that just 4 years of synthetic power have made you and your Party this politically blind, that you can't feel when you are politically stabbing with the sword handle?

Those that are hiding and on the run are never politically benevolent! They can only set you up for complete removal for ever daring to finger them out and for ever daring to point out their hide-out. The price of political naivety is high! Could everybody be wrong that you and your Party are being politically naïve here?
With Zanu-PF far too much is at stake. Zanu-PF will not commit the mistakes of Kaunda, of Chiluba, of Banda, of Gaddafi, of Gbabgo, and of Taylor. They have seen all too well what loss of political power means to political criminals! And Zanu-PF has no friends; no political compromises.
This is all foolish, and this will sure end in political tears!

With this Copac Final Draft Constitution, we afraid, you and your Party have just signed your (political) death sentence. Don't you and your Party ever say you were not warned! But you and your Party have this narrow window, this last opportunity to abort and commute this sure (political) death sentence to something else. Act now!!!
The Copac Final Draft Constitution is a political weapon aimed at you – and your Party – which you and your Party have just sharpened yourselves!

But all this said and done, we hope that in the end you and your Party - if successful at the next elections, if those elections are held at all - will not spend the rest of your political lives on the run from the political goodwill of the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland which you will have abused through this Copac Final Draft Constitution unless you act to abort it. You and your Party can ask Zanu-PF how it feels to spend a whole political life on the run from the People of the Kingdom of Matebeleland, and barricading yourself from them. Act like Zanu-PF, and as Zanu-PF, you will have collided with truth! The outcome is one, and it is the one we are all now staring in the near political horizon but which some of us continue to want to be in denial of!

Please reply through our e-mail address: kingdomofmatebeleland@yahoo.com.

We thank you.
KMNC