WITH THE MDC IN CHAOS, WHO CAN HALT ZANU-PF?
Zimbabwe’s opposition party, the MDC, is in disarray, as Douglas Mwonzora, a leader of a faction within it, has seized control and seems to be enabling the ruling Zanu-PF
When Nelson Chamisa took over in February 2018 as the leader of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, called the Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T), after the death of former leader Morgan Tsvangirai, fissures emerged.
Many critics weren’t convinced Chamisa could seriously challenge Zanu-PF.
For a start, there was the question of seniority. Before Tsvangirai’s death, Chamisa was one of three deputies. He’d been appointed by Tsvangirai in July 2016, along with Elias Mudzuri, though not during the party’s congress. Thokozani Khupe, however, was appointed as deputy at the party’s 2014 congress and was seen as both more senior and the heir-in-waiting.
At the same time, others felt that Chamisa had dishonoured Tsvangirai by asserting his power over the party, rather brashly, at the former leader’s funeral.
Yet, despite these misgivings, the future of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party wasn’t thought to be under any kind of threat at the time.
Chamisa, after all, had been a poster boy of opposition politics in the troubled country. As a student leader, he became one of the youngest MPs in Zimbabwe in 2000, when the original MDC contested its first elections. He then served as a minister in the unity government of 2009-2013.
Given those credentials, many voters were willing to take a chance on him. And it worked: in the July 2018 election, Chamisa got more than 2million votes — earning the distinction of being President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s major political rival. (In the end,
Mnangagwa won with 2.46-million votes – a margin of 314,026 that the opposition contests.)
But within the party things were less than settled at the time. Talk of a split gathered pace — though this wasn’t fatal, as breakaways within the MDC are nothing new.
Under Tsvangirai the MDC had split twice. First, in 2008, Welshman Ncube’s MDC-N peeled off. Then, in 2014, after secretary-general Tendai Biti was fired by Tsvangirai, Biti set up MDC-Renewal and later the People’s Democratic Party.
Throughout, however, Tsvangirai’s party remained strong, and popular.
Fast-forward to today, and Zimbabwe’s opposition is battling for survival. And, at the heart of its woes is a court challenge to Chamisa’s leadership of the party.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that his leadership was illegitimate as the process that made him president after Tsvangirai died was “illegal”. The court said the party must hold an election within three months.
Those elections happened on December 28, leading, amid much chaos, to the appointment of Douglas Mwonzora as the new leader of a smaller faction of the MDC, asserting its claim over the whole party.
It created a mess, with two distinct factions both claiming to be the only bona fide party. In the end, the courts recognised Mwonzora’s group as the legitimate MDC — and, with the help of the police, Chamisa’s faction was evicted from the head office, which the party had occupied since 1999.
And that was just the start of the chaos. Soon Mwonzora’s faction began recalling legislators who had been elected on Chamisa’s MDC Alliance ticket. The MDC Alliance was formed to contest the 2018 elections and was a merger of three political parties that had split from the original MDC (MDC-T led by Tsvangirai, MDC-N led by Ncube and Biti’s People’s Democratic Party).
To date, 39 MDC-Alliance MPs and 81 local councillors have been “recalled” by Mwonzora, who says he’s the only legitimate leader of Tsvangirai’s original MDC-T.
The upshot, experts say, is that Zimbabwe’s opposition is more feeble than ever. “The opposition is without doubt weak,” says political analyst Rashwheat Mukundu. He points to divisions and splinter groups as well as to the recall of the MPs and councillors and what he describes as “biased” court rulings that led to the MDC Alliance losing its office.
And it doesn’t help that Mnangagwa has cosied up to Mwonzora. Astoundingly, Mwonzora’s parliamentarians recently voted alongside ZanuPF in favour of constitutional amendments to give Zimbabwe’s leader more powers.
Amid all this, some officials from the MDC have also recently defected to Mnangagwa’s ruling Zanu-PF — implying that power, rather than ideology, is their priority.
The MDC Alliance’s Lilian
Timveous and Blessing Chebundo were the first to cross the floor in February. They’ve been followed by Wilson Khumbula, Crosswell Takawira Mugombi, Patrick Chitaka, Nelson Chibhi, Samson Sithole and Simon Simango.
Still, political analyst Rejoice Ngwenya believes the opposition could mount a strong challenge to Mnangagwa in the 2023 elections — but only due to the unpopularity of Zanu-PF, rather than any internal coherence.
“The bulk of Zimbabweans are against the government. If [Mnangagwa] were to call for an election, he would not win it,” he explains.
In other words, any victory for the MDC isn’t a statement of its own popularity, but rather a statement of how loathed Zanu-PF really is.
While Ngwenya believes “the broader opposition has been decent in its stance”, he says that Mwonzora has been “pliant” in his dealings with Mnangagwa.
This cravenness couldn’t have come at a worse time, as Mnangagwa’s party has cracked down on rights again — including denying freedom of speech and association. For example, the opposition has not been allowed to congregate in the past two years.
Covid has become a convenient excuse for Zanu-PF to do this. Recently, protests have been banned under the guise of “enforcing lockdown regulations”, while MDC Alliance officials have been arrested, supposedly for breaching Covid rules.
The party’s Joana Mamombe and Cecilia Chimbiri are in jail after they called for the release of the youth league’s Makomborero Haruzivishe (who has been jailed for 14 months on what are seen as spurious kidnapping charges).
Says Mukundu: “The opposition has been denied mobilisation space, with the smallest of gatherings clamped down by the police for violating Covid regulations while similar and bigger gatherings by the ruling party are left to go ahead.”
You can understand why the autocratic Mnangagwa would want Chamisa out the way. Back in 2018, Chamisa refused to recognise the Zanu-PF leader’s electoral victory — something Mnangagwa feels denied his presidency “legitimacy”.
Chamisa also rejected overtures from Mnangagwa to engage in a “dialogue”.
So, having been spurned by Chamisa, it’s no surprise that Mnangagwa has been courting Mwonzora as the real official opposition, engaging with him under his Political Actors Dialogue platform.
Many people have seen through this. In a recent report on the human rights situation in Zimbabwe, the US government says Mwonzora’s “minor” party has benefited from court rulings that disfranchised voters.
“The high court, in a series of decisions beginning in March 2020, paved the way for a minor political party, the MDC-T, to challenge the leadership of the main opposition party, the MDC Alliance, ignoring earlier jurisprudence that ruled that political parties, as private and voluntary associations, should resolve their differences using internal remedies,” the report reads.
“This decision disenfranchised voters by allowing the minor political party to recall and replace elected MDC Alliance parliamentarians and local councilors.”
Mukundu agrees with this view.
“The fact remains that the main political rivals are the MDC Alliance, led by Chamisa, and Zanu-PF, led by Mnangagwa,” he says.
“Zanu-PF’s strategy is to weaken the MDC Alliance by courting the likes of Mwonzora, among others. The calculation will not have much of an impact on how people vote, as Zimbabweans are divided right in the middle and there is little, if any, space for a third party.”
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. This week, 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 MDCT, 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.
Information minister Monica Mutsvangwa had not responded to the FM’s queries at the time of writing.