Dialogue between Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has been bogged down by succession battles in the ruling party, says MDC secretary-general Welshman Ncube.
No ”formal negotiations” are taking place between the MDC and Zanu-PF as no consensus on the issues for discussion had been reached, explains Ncube.
Ncube and the party’s national chairperson, Isaac Matongo, were in Johannesburg on a diplomatic mission to lobby the heads of Southern African states to take a stronger stand against the Zanu-PF government.
According to Ncube, the negotiation process has been hampered by fights within Zanu-PF about who should succeed President Robert Mugabe, ahead of the ruling party’s conference in December.
”Much of the problem in clearing this issue is that each [Zanu-PF] group thinks it should control the dialogue process so as to secure its own succession ambitions. In some respects until the Zanu-PF succession is clear it is very difficult to actually get consensus.”
Ncube believes: ”A part of what Zanu-PF is doing is censoring voices in the party which have been pushing for dialogue.”
Some of these voices, he says, are of parliamentarians and businessmen aligned to Zanu-PF, ”who realise what is happening is unsustainable at least in the economic sense”.
The MDC, Ncube says, now fears that ”Mugabe might say ‘I have to stay in charge [because of the divisions in Zanu-PF] until we have a settlement with the MDC’. This means after their December conference we will still be exactly where we are.”
There has been hope among some Zimbabwean observers that Mugabe — who is virulently opposed to the MDC — will step down at the Zanu-PF conference, opening the way for substantive talks between the ruling party and the opposition movement.
Zanu-PF’s South African representative, Bigvai Gumede, said his party was prepared to talk to the MDC ”for the good of the Zimbabweans — everybody is suffering from the economic hardships”.
Responding to Ncube’s remarks on the battles over succession in Zanu-PF, Gumede said: ”Like any other party in the world, we would have groupings. We have the Shonas and the Ndebeles. We will not deny that game.”
But he said he had no knowledge of groupings trying to take control of the dialogue process.
Ncube dismissed reports that the MDC was also divided about whether the movement should be trying to negotiate a political settlement with Zanu-PF. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai has persistently poured cold water on reports that his movement has been having substantive talks with Zanu-PF over the future of their country.
”These rumours always emerge from Zanu-PF or South Africa and are an attempt to throw the movement into confusion,” he says. Ncube insisted his movement was united behind Tsvangirai and he fully expected the MDC leader to be re-elected as president at the movement’s next congress, scheduled for February next year.
He explained: ”SADC [the Southern African Development Community] member states constantly express solidarity with the Mugabe regime as opposed to solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe.
”This is encouraging Zanu-PF to believe it can stand up against the rest of the world because they have such African and SADC support. In a way, this has tended not to promote dialogue by making Zanu-PF believe that they have the backing of an opinion that matters to them, African opinion.”