With the MDC in chaos, who can halt ZANU-PF?

While Ngwenya believes “the broader opposition has been decent in its stance”, he says that Mwonzora has been “pliant” in his dealings with Mnangagwa.

This cravenness couldn’t have come at a worse time, as Mnangagwa’s party has cracked down on rights again — including denying freedom of speech and association. For example, the opposition has not been allowed to congregate in the past two years.

Covid-19 has become a convenient excuse for ZANU-PF to do this. Recently, protests have been banned under the guise of “enforcing lockdown regulations”, while MDC Alliance officials have been arrested, supposedly for breaching Covid-19 rules.

The party’s Joana Mamombe and Cecilia Chimbiri are in jail after they called for the release of the youth league’s Makomborero Haruzivishe (who has been jailed for 14 months on what are seen as spurious kidnapping charges).

Says Mukundu: “The opposition has been denied mobilisation space, with the smallest of gatherings clamped down by the police for violating Covid-19 regulations while similar and bigger gatherings by the ruling party are left to go ahead.”

You can understand why the autocratic Mnangagwa would want Chamisa out of the way. Back in 2018, Chamisa refused to recognise the ZANU-PF leader’s electoral victory — something Mnangagwa feels denied his presidency “legitimacy”.

Chamisa also rejected overtures from Mnangagwa to engage in a “dialogue”.

So, having been spurned by Chamisa, it’s no surprise that Mnangagwa has been courting Mwonzora as the real official opposition, engaging with him under his Political Actors Dialogue platform.

Many people have seen through this. In a recent report on the human rights situation in Zimbabwe, the US government says Mwonzora’s “minor” party has benefited from court rulings that disfranchised voters.

“The high court, in a series of decisions beginning in March 2020, paved the way for a minor political party, the MDC-T, to challenge the leadership of the main opposition party, the MDC Alliance, ignoring earlier jurisprudence that ruled that political parties, as private and voluntary associations, should resolve their differences using internal remedies,” the report reads.

“This decision disenfranchised voters by allowing the minor political party to recall and replace elected MDC Alliance parliamentarians and local councilors.”

Mukundu agrees with this view.

“The fact remains that the main political rivals are the MDC Alliance, led by Chamisa, and ZANU-PF, led by Mnangagwa,” he says.

“ZANU-PF’s strategy is to weaken the MDC Alliance by courting the likes of Mwonzora, among others. The calculation will not have much of an impact on how people vote, as Zimbabweans are divided right in the middle and there is little, if any, space for a third party.”

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