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

Ultimately, he says, the real battle is between Chamisa and Mnangagwa; Mwonzora might have tried to mount a coup, but he remains a bit player.

Nonetheless, these ructions will do nothing to help the MDC dethrone Mnangagwa. To win the election, the opposition will need to mobilise apathetic voters and guard against electoral fraud, says Mukundu.

Some have far harsher words for Mwonzora. Journalist and government critic Hopewell Chin’ono believes he is simply a political opportunist.

“He calls himself the opposition leader, yet he is busy helping Mnangagwa tear up Zimbabwe’s constitution, giving the dictator [the] power [to] strip citizens of their human rights!” Chin’ono wrote.

Calling him “unprincipled”, Chin’ono says Mwonzora “is a cheap political charlatan that is being bought with crumbs”.

Certainly, it would seem like many in the MDC-T are acting in their own interests, rather than those of voters.  A constitutional amendment sailed through the senate after three MDC-T senators — Piniel Denga, Morgan Femai and Jane Chifamba — voted in ZANU-PF’s corner, helping the ruling party achieve the required two-thirds majority. The amendments give the president unfettered power to handpick his deputies and judges.

However, MDC-T spokesperson Witness Dube downplays this development, suggesting that his party’s MPs who supported the amendment are women senators who simply supported the clause because it furthered women’s rights. Only, it is a poor answer, partly since only one woman from the MDC-T, Chifamba, supported it.

“As the MDC-T, we debated vigorously, and fought valiantly to oppose this bill,” says Dube. “While we understand how difficult it was for women in the MDC-T … we are disappointed by male senators who may have absconded from the vote.”

Cynics say Mnangagwa’s recent machinations to woo the MDC-T faction suggest an attempt to create a de facto one-party state — an echo of former President Robert Mugabe’s ambitions in the 1980s.

“This is certainly part of an agenda towards a one-party state inspired by China and Rwanda,” Mukundu says.

“Unfortunately, what ZANU-PF misses is that both the Rwandan and the Chinese governments deliver on development and have strict leadership codes. ZANU-PF wants to drink half the cup of the Chinese model, which is autocracy, while denying the rest, which is disciplined leadership, strict anticorruption [measures] and … economic development.”

Either way, it’s an agenda that will fail, he says. Such a move to stifle democracy is anathema in a region where struggles against autocracy are well documented.- Financial Mail

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