IN THE PRESS

IN JULY 2013, Morgan Tsvangirai announced to the world that he had formed an electoral pact with Mavambo Kusile’s Simba Makoni and Zanu Ndonga’s Reketayi Semwayo.

Makoni brought nothing to the so-called Coalition for Change. He had no structures, no voice and no idea.

But he was not the worst part of that announcement.

Semwayo was already registered by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission as an MDC-T candidate for the Chipinge Central National Assembly seat. He was a member of MDC-T who Tsvangirai was parading as a coalition partner.

In essence, Tsvangirai had announced a “coalition” between MDC-T, the one-man band of Simba Makoni, and a member of his own party!

That is the kind of thinking - or lack of thinking - that informs Morgan Tsvangirai’s approach to electoral coalitions.

Last week, Tsvangirai was at it again, trying to weave coalitions out of nothing and hoping for something to emerge out of his tawdry smokeand-mirrors act.

He said he had signed memoranda of understanding with Joice Mujuru and Welshman Ncube.

Mujuru brings nothing but her own vote, and perhaps that of Gift Nyandoro, to the table. Ncube’s potential figures are probably also countable on the fingers of one hand.

In short, Tsvangirai has conspired to create nothing.

And the private media have tried hard to sell that nothing and define it as something.

It is an effort which the tired imaginations over there in the lick-spittle lunatic fringe of the media will have a hard time doing.

The truth is Tsvangirai is no different from the disingenuous commuter omnibus tout who, standing at the doorway of an empty kombi, shouts hoarsely to passersby: “One ari ega!”