Writing for the Mail & Guardian, Jason Moyo asks whether the MDC can still win the next election? Their call for change has worn thin.

A new constitution for Zimbabwe has been agreed on and now parties are looking to the elections.

So, what does Morgan Tsvangirai have to do to win this time? His biggest task will be to reignite the fizz of 2008, which has died down over disappointments in his party’s performance in government and his personal scandals. But there is hope for him yet.

This week, analyst Lance Mambondiani asked in an opinion piece: “Is it possible that we are experiencing a shift in the maturity of the voter, in which politicians are held to account based on their policies rather than their rhetoric?” Yes, but not enough. And as long as candidate quality and policy are still taken as secondary to removing President Robert Mugabe, Tsvangirai has a chance. His party can only win by targeting that “anyone but Mugabe” vote that has carried it for years.

The options on offer are stark: on the one hand, it’s a choice between Mugabe and Tsvangirai. The alternative is simply not bothering to vote at all, an increasingly appealing prospect for many.

Mugabe will run on his black-empowerment drive, promising rural communities near mining operations shares in the mines. Tsvangirai’s own economic policy, known by the acronym Juice, is vague at best. But lack of clear policy is not new to the Movement for Democratic Change and has never stood in its way before.

The MDC’s major struggle will be recreating its vibrant March 2008 campaign. The country’s economic collapse made Tsvangirai’s “change” platform far more appealing than Mugabe’s “100% empowerment” refrain. Tsvangirai ran a well-funded campaign, addressing thousands of red-card-waving supporters. Young people who had previously stayed away from politics came out to vote for the first time. There was a zest in the air, a great expectation that this time change was, indeed, coming.  In an unprecedented turn of events, the MDC was able to campaign freely in the rural areas. Having long been cordoned off by Zanu-PF militants, rural voters flocked to MDC rallies.

The results showed: Zanu-PF lost its parliamentary majority for the first time ever and Tsvangirai won more votes than Mugabe, although not enough to avoid the violent run-off that would follow.

Now, besides the mechanisms still needed to make the election a fair race, rediscovering its 2008 form is what the MDC needs the most. The events of the past five years have broken voters’ resolve: the violent 2008 election aftermath, the mind-numbing talks on the formation of the unity government and then its failure to bring about reform.

Although the economic growth of recent years is stalling, it is not as bad as it was in 2008, when hyper-inflation and food shortages bred deep resentment of Mugabe and drove desperate voters to the polls.

Tsvangirai will need to capitalise on Zanu-PF rhetoric that the party will revive the Zimbabwe dollar if it wins. The “Zim-dollar era” is a dark one for many and the MDC will need to play on those fears.

Tsvangirai’s personal scandals do not help. Those controversies showed that he, too, had built his own Mugabe-esque base of fanatical supporters. It wasn’t his fault, his lieutenants said – it was all some dark conspiracy. The scandals disillusioned many. The erosion in Tsvangirai’s support may not translate to backing for Mugabe or other rivals, but may simply keep people away from the polls.

In the previous election, many voters simply put an X against the name of any MDC candidate on the ballot. Nobody cared who the candidate was. But those voters now feel let down by corruption and lack of service delivery by urban councils run by the MDC.

There is little enthusiasm for the forthcoming election, which, including two referendums, will be the country’s eighth poll in 13 years.

A coalition against Mugabe would seem an obvious option, but it is unlikely. The bitterness between Tsvangirai and Welshman Ncube, leader of the smaller MDC faction, runs deep. In 2007, an attempt to forge an alliance failed, partly because the parties could not agree on who would get certain positions in government if they won. In his autobiography, At the Deep End, Tsvangirai said Ncube and his backers never had any clout. They “were simply riding on my popularity, in the forlorn hope that part of it would rub off on to them”. Many Tsvangirai supporters agree. The two men trade frequent barbs in public, many of the insults eyeroll-inducing in their pettiness. Tsvangirai recently dismissed Ncube as a “village politician”, to which Ncube retorted that allowing Tsvangirai to lead would be like giving a cyclist a bus to drive.

So with no strong policy platform and little chance of an alliance, the only real game the MDC can play is the same one it has played before. The old “change” mantra is really all the MDC has – and it will be tougher to convince voters this time around.

The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has launched a Vote Yes campaign for the new Draft Constitution for Zimbabwe. But what are they doing about the fact that Zanu PF seems to have a very different draft in mind? Ignoring the reality of the political impasse the Constitution-making process has reached isn’t going to get us to a 2nd All-Stakeholder’s Conference, Constitutional Referendum or new elections any quicker.

I was really pleased to see the Parliamentary Monitoring Trust (Zimbabwe) telling it like it is … their focus in their recently published Parliamentary Monitor is on Members of Parliament who don’t attend Parliamentary sittings.

According to the PMTZ, Heneri Dzinotyiwei, MDC-T, Budiriro hasn’t shown his face at 26 sittings. Whilst Jonathan Moyo, Zanu PF, Tsholotsho North has been missing for 31 and Jameson Timba, MDC-T, Mount Pleasant has been absent for 29 sittings.

Are there legitimate reasons for this high level of non-attendance? Where do ordinary Zimbabweans access information like this which will help them make informed decisions when an election comes around? It’s important that we vote according to performance. When ordinary people don’t do their jobs properly they get fired. Let’s fire MPs that renege on their duties.

Here’s an excerpt from the PMTZ’s bulletin:

Then as chance would have it, my mom attended a wedding in Harare and she came back complaining that she had seen very big houses. “And why would people build such big houses, covering this whole yard,” she said waving across our big rural yard. She then said that she had been told that politicians lived there. “This has made me realise that we vote them so that they become rich. As such, I will not vote again. I will get into the ballot box to spoil my vote. I will mark 3 times, I know how to do it as we were taught to vote.” The reasoning in my mom’s argument was an eye opener. The intellectuals may continue to argue it is going to be difficult to get that vote out. Maybe the two intellectuals were wrong. They may have been arguing in the abstract. But for my mother, it was a resolution she could have made. We may have apathy. Or more spoiled ballots. The two may be a result of lack of voter education. But using my mom’s argument, the spoilt papers are not out of ignorance but a protest.

Subscribe to the electronic version of the Parliamentary Monitor by emailing: pmtzimbabwe [at] gmail [dot] com

In Zimbabwe, it is clear that the opposition party MDC (MDC has lost the mojo and has been weakened by in-fighting) is not the party that will bring down Mugabe (as it was hoped), but expect a potential split within the ruling ZANU-PF party. As Mugabe’s health continues to deteriorate, we expect infighting as members vie for control and Mugabe’s position.

Read Ndumba Kamwanyah’s assertion that “Southern Africa’s ‘democracies’ do not produce citizens but subjects controlled by governments due to the hierarchical nature of the region’s politics, which demands obedience.”

It’s a new year and it’s that period when people say all kinds of silly things and expect to be taken seriously. From ordinary Jacks to extraordinary Dicks, you hear them mouthing crap and you wonder what inspires this specialisation in crapology. Then you think, maybe they are exhibiting unbound elation that they made into the New Year when other people were not so fortunate. But then, is being alive reason to say silly things? So, imagine the response to the question, “Why are you being silly,” “Because I’m alive!” I am not just talking about the so-called resolutions for the fresh year which history has shown have become fashionable empty proclamations of nonexistent faith, but perhaps importantly I am inevitably referencing the political.

I heard the other day a Zanu PF (who else?) mandarin going on and on about how his party would open up the primary election contests where every Jack and Dick would throw in their hat. He obviously did not include himself, for if he did, it would mean he would also be welcoming challengers within the party to vie for the representation of the rural folk where voters have been taken for granted for 30 something years. But knowing these people and their history of violence where they have indeed become career politicians through means nefarious, the sincerity is suspect as rejection in primary polls automatically means “ABCya” to being part of that plutocracy that knows no shame. So why dice with “economic death” as it were if you can afford not to?

A spook or former spook, whatever his “official” title is, was reported to be challenging a scion of Zimbabwe politics, alleging the nephew of the president had done jack for the people. Predictably, the dreadlocked one struck back with the usual foul language, betraying his aversion for popular democracy. It would be interesting then if the guy fingered for “invading” Kuimba Shiri last year was rejected by the people during the primaries. Would he blame the MDC-T for his loss? He would he blame sanctions? I strongly suspect he would blame it on vote buying, himself knowing only too well of course how this works!

Then I also read the other day another day the MDC-N national organising secretary claiming the MDC-T was bent on turning the city of Bulawayo into some kind of Gehenna, citing policy proclamations by the MDC-T leadership in the city. He proffered all kinds of silly case examples, and I wondered why he was vesting the MDC-T with so much powers, the omnipotency of the gods. It was as if the MDC-T says jump and the people merely ask how high? Surely, does the MDC-T wield that much power over the people of Bulawayo that at the behest of Tabitha Khumalo and others, the city risks being turned into a sinner’s paradise? In any case, all Zimbabwean cities are faced with the same bloody issues whose authors are already known. Yet we have a chap who should know better seeing that he himself has no constituency he represents going on with the crappy political rhetoric “made popular” by such compatriots as Gabriel Chaibva, Jonathan Moyo, Chris Mutsvangwa, Godwin Nguni and many others who have made very self-righteous comments about the PM when they themselves have failed to call Mugabe’s bluff about extra-marital affairs and living with HIV within Zanu PF apparatchiks.

And you can bet your butt that as elections approach, we shall be subjected to even more silly crap from educated men and women in politics. But then hey, politics is by its nature elitist, excluding the voices of the ordinary folks, that’s why we have these petite bourgeoisie intellectuals saying all this kind of nonsense and expecting to be taken seriously.

In a follow up to my disappointment with the MDC’s cancelled Minister’s feedback meeting, I was interested to get a new text message last night from them:

You are invited to attend the MDC 12th Anniversary Rally at Gwanzura Stadium on Saturday 10 September 2011, Time 10:30am – 4:30pm.

So the community feedback meeting is cancelled. But not the anniversary rally?

It’s hard not to be cynical that this is because politicians find it so much easier to talk at people, rather than speak with them.