Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is fighting a civil war over whether to participate in elections for an upper house of Parliament next month. And it’s not a pretty sight.
The battle is being fought in full public view as newspapers carry daily reports of party leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s increasingly desperate attempts to block candidates from filing nomination papers.
A slim majority of party officials want to take part in the contest scheduled for November 26. Tsvangirai is strongly opposed to participation.
He wants to prevent any further collaboration with an electoral management system that he says ”breeds illegitimate outcomes” and which he blames for the party’s setback in the March general election.
The majority believes that if the party is to retain its presence at the centre of the nation’s political life it must contest seats for the revived Senate, some of which it will undoubtedly win.
The MDC’s strength lies in its urban constituencies, which, in March firmly slammed their doors on President Robert Mugabe’s political pretensions.
The party’s secretary general, Professor Welshman Ncube, is seen as heading the faction of the party that favours participation in the Senate poll. It is largely based in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, and reflects the MDC’s strong presence in the southern Matabeleland provinces. Tsvangirai’s support lies mostly in the capital, Harare.
This has given the struggle an ethnic dimension. But to portray it in those terms would be to miss several salient points. Tsvangirai had his reservations about entering the March poll borne out when the party was placed at a disadvantage by the refusal of the public media to allow the opposition anything more than token space during the campaign and, more seriously, by what he regards as the institutional bias of the electoral system.
These concerns are shared by civil society organisations such as the National Constitutional Assembly which believes the problem of a lopsided electoral playing field will not be solved until a democratic constitution is introduced.
The MDC’s national council voted to participate, an outcome the party leader declines to recognise.
While Tsvangirai’s critics see him as dictatorial and headstrong, few doubt his popularity with grassroots supporters and the trade union movement or question his courage in facing down Mugabe’s menaces. He has twice been charged with treason.
Certainly no one else in the party leadership would be able to draw the large crowds he can summon at the hustings. His only serious rival, Ncube, while a master of legislative detail, is viewed by some in the party as over-anxious to pursue the politics of accommodation.
Ncube is the MDC’s negotiator in suspended talks with Zanu-PF on constitutional reform.
The state-owned media has been having a field day publicising the divisions in the ranks of the opposition that have conveniently obscured Zanu-PF’s internecine fighting over the succession to Mugabe. The 81-year-old ruler would welcome an MDC boycott, analysts suggest, because it would enable him to use the Senate as a retirement home for surplus personnel. The MDC, on the other hand, would be yielding ground in areas where Zanu-PF has no prospect of winning votes.
Divisions deepened this week as Tsvangirai stepped up his campaign against participation while the opposing camp proceeded with the selection of candidates.
The MDC has overcome formidable obstacles over the past six years in mounting a challenge to Mugabe’s sclerotic rule, coming within a whisker of winning the 2000 general election. It offers a comprehensive package of policies on governance and economic recovery that many parties in Africa would be happy to embrace. But it has now lost focus on the big picture of how to confront the regime and is instead absorbed in a destructive battle of its barons who refuse to agree on tactics, a struggle that has resonance in the fragmented politics of Kenya and Malawi.
Its spokespersons suggest the current unedifying spectacle points to healthy debate at the top. It more realistically reflects the conundrum of how a party committed to democratic values can take on a regime determined to use brute force to prevent it.
There are no easy answers to that. Meanwhile, it looks as if Zimbabwe’s best hope for a democratic future is determined to go down fighting — itself!
Iden Wetherell is group projects editor of the Zimbabwe Independent and Standard newspapers