President Mugabe set to host Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai at his 85th Birthday Celebration in Chinhoyi. Will the Military Commanders be there to celebrate and salute them?
Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai will attend the 21st February Movement celebrations of President Mugabe’s birthday.
This sounds like the most outrageous political brinkmanship on the part of the MDC leader whose party has been at the centre of discrediting the event in all its 10 years of existence.
Questions are being raised about the credibility of the MDC if its leader decides to attend an event it has rubbished as unnecessarily stupendous in economically ravaged Zimbabwe.
The Prime Minister’s office has justified the acceptance of the invitation to the fete on the following basis;
"He was invited and he is attending. It's courteous on (the part of) his party and it's in the spirit of national unity," Tsvangirai's spokesperson James Maridadi said.
Indeed it is courteous to accept Presidential invitations and advantageous to project a semblance of cohesion within the Coalition Government through simultaneous public parading the two most powerful drivers of the initiative.
But is that the real reason why Tsvangirai has accepted the invitation or could there be other underlying political reasons that have been conveniently withheld from the public?
During the March 2008 elections the MDC managed to garner only 12 of the 63 Parliamentary seats in the combined Mashonaland Provinces.
Its performance in the Senatorial segment of the election was equally bad when it only managed to secure 1 of the combined 18 seats allocated to the three Mashonaland Provinces.
Mugabe outpolled Tsvangirai in all the Mashonaland Provinces in the Presidential section of the said election.
The recent upsurge in violent invasion of commercial farmlands is mainly restricted to the Mashonaland Provinces.
The Mashonaland Provinces have been by far the most difficult for the Prime Minister and his MDC party to campaign and make political inroads into because of the 21st February Movement and Border Gezi youths roadblocks.
The President’s birthday celebrations present the Prime Minister an real opportunity to charm the doubting Mugabe youth supporters at the centre of political thuggery against his MDC supporters.
The opportunity of not just free but also authoritative access to the Mashonaland youth electorate that will be bussed into Chinhoyi for the Presidential Birthday party was too good a political opportunity for Tsvangirai and his party to miss.
Secondly the opportunity for the Prime Minister to be able to deliver his message on the illegality of the current upsurge in commercial farm invasions in the province and its ramifications to the Government’s economic turnaround programme were too compelling for the Prime minister to let slip through his fingers.
The opportunity for the Prime Minister to show his newly found authority over those in the Security Ministries who are leading nefarious pockets of resistance to his ascendancy to power and show their misinformed supporters that they will salute him and disarm them of their invincibility is a relished political opportunity the President’s birthday celebrations presents.
They commanders have to make a choice between attending the celebrations which will compel them to acknowledge the premier’s presence or boycott the occasion which may reflect negatively on their loyalty to President Mugabe.
It places the Military Commanders in a no win situation doesn’t it?
There is the price to pay for this political brinkmanship on the part of the Premier. His unforgiving followers who have been at the receiving end of Zanu PF thuggery for over a decade will be absolutely devastated to see their leader feasting with the President on behalf of whose entrenchment in power they were violated.
The economic hardship they face and the obvious whipping of dissent emotions within his Party by detractors will always be considerations the Premier will be on the lookout for.
But he knows as well as his detractors know that the long term survival of his party lies in its ability to attract support from those that were misled into believing he was a puppet of the West and Britain and there are none worse than those in the Mashonaland Provinces where fortuitously the Presidential Birthday fete will be staged.
It is this ability on the part of the Premier to identify opportunities to connect with a captive political audience that has seen him grow the MDC into political heavyweight.
It is unlikely the Premier will not be allowed to deliver a public birthday wish to the President and he is likely to exploit that opportunity to endear himself to President Mugabe’s most ardent supporters.
What will that mean to Zanu PF’s political monopoly in Mashonaland?
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