Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara is very intelligent academically, but apart from his books and professorship he has failed to live up to people’s expectations.
Instead, he has now become more irrelevant to the country’s politics than before.
If anything, he must show his maturity by gracefully bowing out of politics.
There is no doubt that Mutambara was the most popular and well-respected student leader there ever was during his university days and many people thought his radical approach to politics then would grow into visionary, well-guided political maturity and wisdom.
But his years in the US removed him from the realities of Zimbabwean politics and being catapulted to the smaller MDC presidency from nowhere was unbelievable to himself that he is still slapping himself on the face to see if this was real.
From a mere ordinary citizen on Monday to president of a party on Tuesday, with elections looming and the possibility of becoming president of the nation, Mutambara was overwhelmed and he still hasn’t found his place yet in Zimbabwean politics hence the confusion in his head and the stupidity of his utterances.
He feels he has to say something in order to remain relevant, but in the process he often blunders. So far he has not said anything of substance.
In fact, he is what US rapper Eminem was referring to when he said: “Some people talk like they got something to say but when they open their mouth it’s just a bunch of gibberish.”
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It is true that Zimbabweans knew after all that Welshman Ncube was well before he ascended to the MDC presidency running the show, and Mutambara would not dare go against the man who gave him the job. Mutambara is simply a chancer.
But what was going through Ncube’s mind when he settled on Mutambara, an outsider, for the position of his breakaway MDC president?
Mutambara was not even a practising politician, if at all. At best, he had merely been a student leader at university at some turbulent time; thereafter, he had pursued his robotics career in the Diaspora.
Why couldn’t the breakaway MDC settle for one of their own, to head their party, instead of opting for a total stranger who had no political credentials to talk of, and was not even a member of their party?
Did Mutambara think that breaking into the presidency of a political party, through the roof, without breaking a sweat, would be a permanent and sustainable windfall or did he know that he was merely being used, like we all knew, to incubate Ncube’s grand agenda?
He certainly would have been very naïve to think that he had been so anointed for any quality that he had.
An intelligent man like Mutambara should have known that he was a mere pawn on Ncube’s chessboard. He was never designed to survive beyond a congress.
Will Mutambara ever rise from the dead? Or will the robotics professor, who is widely viewed in political circles as a bundle of confusion, be swallowed into the belly of the beast?
Mutambara had until his fallout with Ncube played a key role in resolving the Zimbabwe political crisis, but he has failed to appreciate he can’t play that role anymore — for poor Mutambara has been outwitted by his adversary.
It is time he called it quits. Reports he tried to hoodwink the Sadc secretariat by trying to smuggle his delegation into the crucial summit to discuss the Zimbabwe crisis do not do him any good.
The secretariat was spot on and would take none of that. This is why they invited him as DPM and Ncube as principal.
Could that be the main reason he returned home from Johannesburg in a huff and went on a tirade against NewsDay?
Mutambara should wake up and smell the coffee!
