Working man’s hero vs pensive scholar

Like a variegated leaf, the old Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) didn’t respond to sunlight and other atmospheric conditions in a uniform way.

There was party president Morgan Tsvangirai, a former trade unionist and the working man’s hero, who wanted to tread the populist route, and then there was his secretary general, Welshman Ncube, a professor of family law with a tendency to seek consensus through scholarly persuasion and debate.

In the Senate debacle that split the party, Ncube favoured the ballot box over Tsvangirai’s withdrawal from the electoral process. Ncube ditched Tsvangirai in a bitter and messy divorce and opted for a union with fellow intellectual Arthur Mutambara, a professor of robotics.

Political analysts argue that Tsvangirai, unshackled from the legalistic constraints of Ncube, now has a golden opportunity to mould the MDC in his own militant image.

Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research academic Robert Muponde said: ‘The Ncube camp believes in rational fights in courts and in parliamentary politics. That approach doesn’t work in a politically skewed environment.”

Tsvangirai appears to have rediscovered his appetite for confronting President Robert Mugabe’s government in the streets. He has signalled his intention to abandon the hitherto unsuccessful path of negotiation and compromise as a means of dislodging the ruling Zanu-PF.

The MDC president has obligingly lived up to his new billing. At the beginning of April, and with Easter on the horizon, he took up the messianic metaphor at a rally in the second city of Bulawayo. ‘If it means Tsvangirai should die in order to free this country, then let me die because there is no easy struggle where people do not die, and I say I am prepared to die for Zimbabwe.”

Although Tsvangirai has been shooting from the hip, Muponde noted that he is necessarily vague about his programme of action. ‘He has been tried for treason before, so he wants to be careful how he expresses the same sentiments without being accused of courting violence. Yet he is increasingly presenting him- self as a fighter ready to give up his life for the democratic struggle.”

Concurring, doctoral fellow at the University of Witwatersrand’s international relations department, Gwinyayi Dzinesa, argued that the split in the MDC might have galvanised ‘the trade-unionist grounded Morgan Tsvangirai to firmly carry forward his long-favoured militant approach when dealing with the Zanu-PF government. There is no longer the restraining and pacifying influence personified by the dovish Welshman Ncube.”

Eldred Masunungure, a political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe, also noted that ‘Tsvangirai may have felt like a caged leader. If you have people with different backgrounds … it may be difficult to find common ground.”

But Bheki Moyo, a researcher at the Pretoria-based Africa Institute of South Africa, is of the view that the divisions in the opposition’s ranks have weakened it. ‘I would say the party has been dealt a heavy blow. Ncube and Tsvangirai complemented each other. Left to himself, Tsvangirai could have led protests that could have resulted in bloodshed, imprisonment and unnecessary detentions.”

Moyo said that street protests had to be well coordinated, as was the case in the recent demonstrations in Nepal. The politics of the street is a place Tsvangirai’s feet are more accustomed to boasts his new secretary general, Tendai Biti. He said the parting of ways of the divergent factions of the MDC was the ‘jolt” that the party needed to rescue it from its ‘march towards oblivion”. ‘There is going to be mass action, but I cannot guarantee the outcome.”

While ruing the failure of the MDC to capitalise on disgruntlement with the government after the disputed 2002 presidential elections, the 2005 parliamentary elections and particularly the controversial and universally condemned Operation Murambatsvina, Biti said his party would no longer merely react to the government but ‘we are going to create opportunities”.

But Masunungure doubted that Zimbabweans would be prepared ‘at this stage” to participate in mass demonstrations. ‘A mass stay-away would be a success, but I can’t see people confronting the police on the streets. I don’t think they yet have the courage to face the cops.”

The challenge, then, for the streetwise Tsvangirai and his party will be to inspire their cowed supporters to confront the whizzing copper of soldiers’ guns and baton-wielding riot police notorious for the brutality with which they have dealt with protests in the past.