A recent survey jointly conducted by Mass Public Opinion Institute and Afrobarometer has shown that a majority of Zimbabweans had lost confidence in opposition political parties and shifted allegiance to Zanu PF.
However, the opposition parties have refused to accept Afrobarometer’s latest poll survey where they were forewarned of the impending doom should they fail to urgently address the negative perception the public has over them.
Yet, it is important for the parties that instead of dismissing the survey results as “nonsense” and burying their heads in the sand, the opposition politicians should embrace the contents and act on the recommendations to better their public perception. The opposition parties in Zimbabwe have enjoyed massive support, for almost a decade, to the extent of even winning the March 2008 harmonised elections although Zanu PF leader President Robert Mugabe refused to hand over power.
But it is the trend set by the opposition parties that is worrying that each time they are warned of an impending disaster they have refused to accept the results of the poll surveys and labelled them anti-democratic.
In the run-up to the 2013 general elections opposition MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai again contemptuously dismissed the think-tank’s survey which predicted his loss to Mugabe. And when the election results were announced, he was left with egg on his face.
The vote-rigging claims his party made could not stick given the disorder in his camp which eventually led to another historic split early last year.
Now two years on and tellingly three years before another scheduled poll, the think-tank has produced another gloomy picture of the country’s alternatives to the ruling Zanu PF party. Is it not an established fact that the opposition in Zimbabwe is in shambles? The public, as it turns out, has turned its back against opposition politicians and now trusts discredited public institutions such as the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, the police and even the military despite their chequered history of human rights abuses.
It is the kind of behaviour that Zimbabweans are tired of to the extent that they have been forced to proverbially love their adversaries.
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The recommendations in the survey should actually spur the opposition into revising their methodologies, tactics and strategies. Zimbabweans want change, but not just for the sake of it. No sane electorate would thrust their trust in parties that always fragment over slight provocation.
Mugabe and his 35-year-old administration, bar their legendary failings, have maintained a modicum of political stability — a factor that the electorate values most. Even if, for argument’s sake, Afrobarometer cooked up the facts and figures in the survey report, would there be any harm in the opposition taking the outcome as positive criticism and urgently coalesce to find a common position that will assist them dislodge Mugabe?
Zimbabwe’s problem is it has a conglomeration of opportunists who for years have taken advantage of the disgruntlement amongst our people to score cheap political points without proffering tangible alternatives to the ruling cabal.
If anything, opposition politicians have turned into Zanu PF prototypes, mimicking the master as it were and displaying the same dictatorial tendencies that Zimbabweans have endured over the past 35 years.
The results of the Afrobarometer survey call for a sober reflection. The opposition must go back to the drawing board and reconfigure for a final assault in 2018. But given their negative response to the survey results, it could be expecting too much from them.
Ours is a monumental failure of leadership and literally having round pegs in square holes.
