“According to Goche, Mugabe had agreed to step down to ensure proper transfer of power, there was need for us to take some of their Zanu PF winners into the coalition administration,” said Tsvangirai in his book, AT THE DEEP END.
Mugabe would not have considered stepping down if Tsvangirai had not won the 50% plus one and therefore Tamborinyoka is right in saying Mugabe was “defeated outright”. Having said that one has to ask what Tsvangirai himself said on this key point in his book.
We have to remember that when ZEC starting dragging their feet about releasing the results MDC announced that Tsvangirai had polled 60% and then a few days later the party revised the figure downwards to 55%. So what does Tsvangirai say he polled this time? More significantly does he explain why MDC had shot itself in the foot by having to revise it own figures?
The whole world would want to know why Tsvangirai jumped to the conclusion that he needed to take some Zanu PF members into his administration. With the Zanu PF ship sinking it was not surprising that many top Zanu PF officials would want to jump ship. Still Tsvangirai neither owned them anything nor did they deserve any consideration let alone favours.
Tsvangirai has made a big song and dance about how SADC and AU forced him into a power sharing arrangement with Mugabe, particular whenever the latter is playing hardball – which has been often. The truth is Tsvangirai did not need any persuading; he was clearly thinking of forming a coalition anywhere.
There is nothing wrong with being magnanimous and invite one’s defeated rivalries into a coalition administration in a grand gesture of reconciliation and forgiveness per se. It all depends on the motive behind the move.
Zimbabwe has suffered from gross mismanagement, rampant corruption for thirty years and, in the last ten years, from all out looting by the country’s ruling elite. This has resulted in the worst economic melt down in human history and millions of Zimbabweans have been thrown into object poverty and life expectancy, the quantitative and qualitative acid test of life, has plummeted from 65 years to 34 years. This has all happened because the ordinary Zimbabweans were denied their basic and fundamental right to a meaningful say in the governance of the country.
Ghana’s first President Dr Kwame Nkrumah was right; “Seek you the political rights and the economic rights will follow.” The people of Zimbabwe have seen their hopes and dreams of freedom, liberty and economic prosperity turned into a nightmare in which their suffering and lives count for nothing. They have failed to stop this juggernaut onslaught because they had no political rights!
The banner behind which all black Zimbabweans stood before independence in 1980 was: “No Zimbabwean should ever be treated the same way the white colonialists treated us!” It is totally unacceptable should still be treated as if they were the scum of the earth thirty years after independence. And three years since the formation of the GNU nothing in that regard has changed!
For all his posturing as his own man committed to democratic change, Tsvangirai has always been scarred stiff of Mugabe and Zanu PF. He never believed that he could rule the country without Mugabe and Zanu PF’s cooperation regardless the size of the electoral mandate he may get from the electorate. Getting Mugabe off the hook after the sham June 2008 elections and then granting him all his dictatorial powers to loot and terrorise was not a gesture of reconciliation but a shameless act of appeasement of a ruthless dictator and his cronies. The biggest loser of this political prostitution is the ordinary people whose hopes of finally seeing an end to tyrannical rule and a life in dignity have once again been dashed.
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