Zimbabwe’s political crisis mutates like a virus, a fact that Zimbabwe’s opposition politicians seem not to be aware of.
NewsDay Editorial
At the turn of the millennium, it was very easy to diagnose the malaise at the heart of Zimbabwe’s failing economy. President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF had in the 20 years since independence brought a once vibrant economy to its knees through bad politics and ill-advised economic policies.
Thousands of workers had lost jobs during the Bretton-Woods-prescribed economic structural adjustment programme.
Those who had managed to remain in their jobs were unable to put food on their tables, could no longer afford to send their children to school and often had to resort to degrading means of sustenance.
The general feeling was that Mugabe had been an unqualified failure and the only way to bring the economy back on track was to depose him. It was this feeling that informed the politics of the first few years of the new millennium.
But after a huge chunk of the population began to warm up to the land reform programme, opinion started to get somewhat divided. Hundreds of thousands of people had begun a new life under the arrangement.
In the middle of last decade, it was clear Mugabe was fighting back; the popular vote was mostly divided through the middle. Even in 2008, it would seem Zanu PF collected more votes than the opposition, although Mugabe himself marginally lost to MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
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This pointed to the fact that what would have been a solution in 2000 was not necessarily the solution in the latter part of the decade. But Tsvangirai and his team had not come to grips with this new reality, so they continued to harp solely for the deposition of Mugabe.
During the subsistence of the government of national unity, the MDC remained stuck in the same space when the narrative had changed. More and more people had benefited immensely from Mugabe’s policies, even when most of them were populist and unsustainable.
Thousands of households were now living better lives than they had ever imagined, especially those who had gone into tobacco farming.
Those who had not benefited from land reform saw with their own eyes the difference that the project had made in other people’s lives and began to yearn for the same.
The MDC did not offer an equally empowering alternative, hence it lost dismally in July last year.
It was interesting therefore that the ageing interim chairman of the proposed “grand coalition”, Samuel Sipepa Nkomo said the proposed coalition of “progressive forces” would seek to unseat the ruling Zanu PF in the 2018 elections. That’s precisely what they have been failing to do since 2000.
The solution to the crisis is no longer about unseating Zanu PF; the “grand coalition” should tell the people what they will bring to the table when they get into government. Its major challenge is neither Mugabe nor Tsvangirai, but its own ability to come up with an agenda that galvanises the people into wishing for change — quite some task.
