Tsvangirai not at liberty to talk about MOUs with Mujuru and Ncube

Tuesday, 25 April 2017

MOUs and alliances: Explaining the unfolding process

Last week saw President Morgan Tsvangirai sign two Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with leaders of two political parties, Dr. Joice Mujuru and Professor Welshman Ncube to mark the commencement of a delicate process of several  players coming together to contest Zanu PF as a united front in next year’s election.

This was the beginning of a negotiation process that will see Zimbabweans of all shades and colours coming together to coalesce into a formidable people’s alliance that will contest against Zanu PF next year.

We are heartened by the fact that Zimbabweans have largely welcomed the emerging convergence even though there have been several requests from both the media and the generality of the people. The inquiries are ranging from requests of copies of the MOUs to inquiries on whether President Tsvangirai is in talks with this or that other political leader or institution.

The facts of the matter are that the two memoranda are just the beginning of a process with both current and potential partners. As things stand, we are not at liberty to talk about specific MOU issues but to comment generally on the process and the output.

Discussions are still on-going both with current and potential partners in the form of political parties and other key networks such as churches, war veterans, students and other stakeholders. Suffice to say that the parties that have signed the MOU are at substantive stages of negotiations and once a full agreement is hammered out, a public announcement will be made.

We also continue to engage other political parties and some of the key networks stated above and the outcome of those engagements will be made public at the appropriate time. We are unable to give indicative time-frames at this stage save to say in our party, alliance building is receiving priority attention from President Tsvangirai, in line with the exclusive mandate given to him by the party’s national council to deal with this important matter.

We understand the nation’s anxiety around this process but it must also be understood that we cannot be negotiating in public.

We are alive to the fact that these alliances are about the people of Zimbabwe and not about the leaders who are engaged in the talks and that is why we keep coming back to update Zimbabweans at the appropriate stages, as we did last week.

It would be premature for us at this stage to get into the details of the current state of the negotiations after the signing of the MOUs as well as going public about who else President Tsvangirai is negotiating with. Going public at every stage of this delicate and sensitive process would be tantamount to negotiating in public and would be disrespectful both to our current and potential partners.

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