Welcome to sanity, Cde Mutasa

via Welcome to sanity, Cde Mutasa – DailyNews Live 16 January 2015 by Luke Tamborinyoka

HARARE – It is refreshing to hear Zanu PF stalwarts attacking their own party on the same grounds and using the same language we in the MDC have used over the years.

Reading the press statement by former Zanu PF secretary for administration, Didymus Mutasa and the allegations he makes against his former party is like reading a statement from the MDC’s information and publicity department.

Here is a senior Zanu PF official, until very recently the secretary for administration, bemoaning the lack of democracy in Zanu PF and the endemic violence, intimidation, fear, dictatorship and corruption in the party.

This had been the MDC charge sheet against Zanu PF but the tables have turned!

The former defendants in the MDC charge sheet are now the complainants, raising the same issues we have raised over the years.

It can only be a vindication of the MDC when Zanu PF is now accusing itself of electoral theft, violence and intimidation!

And while Mutasa is at it, he has further charges to make about his party’s royalty!

“Amai Mugabe went around the country preaching the gospel of hate in the presence of our impressionable youths and the traumatised, impoverished nation,” said Mutasa.

Since when has Mutasa begun to realise that the nation is traumatised and impoverished?

Mutasa even has the audacity to repeat what we in the MDC have been saying while he was in that party’s cockpit; that Zanu PF is a danger to the culture of constitutionalism in the country.

“This approach to constitutionalism (of disrespecting its own constitution) by a ruling party can pose a risk to constitutionalism at the national level,” said the Zanu PF former secretary for administration.

The refreshing thing is that it is not the MDC saying Zanu PF is a threat to the national Constitution.

This is Zanu PF saying so to itself.

Mutasa makes a humbling admission that Zanu PF uses violence, fear, intimidation and victimisation. And this was a senior man in Zanu PF only a few weeks ago who is admitting to these traits of his party.

The question is: If Zanu PF can unleash such fear, violence and intimidation to its own members in internal central committee elections, as admitted by its former senior official, was the MDC wrong all these years in its characterisation of the national electoral environment as poisoned?

Put simply, if Zanu PF has the capacity to so brazenly rig its own election, is it capable of running a credible national election?

Mutasa talks of the planting of “fear” in the minds of Zanu PF structures during the central committee elections, fear which “deprived party cadres of their right to elect leaders of their choice!”

A party which deprives its own members from electing leaders of their own choice in an internal party election can only do worse when it comes to subverting the rights of ordinary people in a national election.

Surely, if you can rape your own daughter, you can only be a greater threat to the broader society and it cannot be an empty allegation if your neighbour makes the same accusation!!

For some of us, the best was yet to come from Mutasa: “Each time the party faces challenges, it resorts to brute force.” What more would MDC cadres like us add if a former secretary-general of a party, who has been part of its leadership for over 40 years, can sum it up so aptly like this.

Certainly, if the “December Zanu PF meeting” masqueraded as a congress as Mutasa puts it, it did so in the same manner the July event masqueraded as an election.

Mutasa says Zanu PF “denied innocent members their constitutional right to freely elect leaders of their choice”.

We would add, Nyati, that the same party, with you in the cockpit, committed the same crime on July 31, 2013.

The same way Zanu PF is now being run by an “illegitimate leadership” is exactly the same way the country is being run by a leadership without a mandate from the people.

Ironically, Mutasa unwittingly admits to being part of the rot: “The sad events of the past months reflect a deep-seated historical failure by the party leadership………”

If the failure is historical as you put it, and you have been part of that history in the leadership of the party, are your hands clean and are you suddenly out of that bracket of failure, Nyati?

The good news is that at least you can now see the rot in your own party. Vana vembwa havasvinuri musi mumwe chete.

That you are repeating what we have been saying all these years is a confirmation of the magic national phrase of the moment: national convergence.

There is emerging national consensus from diverse groups and political parties on the identity of the beast that needs confrontation!

Even Robert Mugabe knows what is wrong and who is to blame for the current sad national predicament.

That is why he can afford to boldly say, with neither shame nor compunction: “Pasi neZanu PF.”

Welcome to sanity!

*Tamborinyoka doubles as the spokesperson to MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and the party’s director of information and publicity. He writes here in his personal capacity.