Whimsical laughter in power corridors

Dr Makoni and Dumiso Dabengwa pushing the MKD electoral cause that flattered only to deceive.

Denford Magora of the tumultuous Zanu PF appendage Mavambo Kusile Dawn (MKD) struggling to transform itself into a fully fledged political formation because of allegations of fiduciary impropriety, unsevered umbilical links with Zanu PF and leadership paralysis has found solace in cyber opposition politics in Zimbabwe.

His latest instalment on the Zimbabwe Observer is clear testimony of what happens to political charlatans without grassroots support who choose to make hay after the onset of the rains.

Magora joined hands with Retired Army Major Kudzayi Mbudzi, disgraced Zanu PF technocrat Ibbo Mandaza, quitter Dr Nkosana Moyo geriatric Edgar Tekere and other failed Zanu PF political gold diggers like Kindness Paradza, Dr Fay Chung, Margret Dongo, Muchadeyi Masunda and other former Forum Party of Zimbabwe elitists to advise Dr Simba Makoni to enter the 2008 Presidential race at the last minute.

They were later to gain the support of former PF Zapu and later Zanu PF Politburo luminary Dumiso Dabengwa only for Dr Makoni to be humbled into a distant third place in the four man race pitying Tsvangirai, Mugabe, Makoni and Towungana.

After losing the election Dr Makoni went to the Lusaka SADC summit where instead of conceding debate he tried to salvage lost political credibility by instead advancing the Government of National Unity concept that the MDC leader had proclaimed he would pursue when forming the new government following his victory in the Presidential elections.

Dr Makoni presented the idea as his own and tried to persuade SADC Heads of State to support him to ascend to the helm of the GNU citing acrimony between Mugabe and Tsvangirai as being counterproductive to any government in which the two were involved at the apex.

He was totally embarrassed when instead SADC Heads of State mandated then South Africa President Thabo Mbeki to mediate negotiations for a political settlement that excluded him but instead accommodated Professor Mutambara who had pulled out of the Presidential race and pulled his renegade MDC political formation’s weight behind Dr Makoni’s candidature.

As soon as he was drafted back into the political limelight Professor Mutambara moved swiftly to distance his formation which had won a paltry but crucial 10 parliamentary seats from Dr Makoni’s disgraced MKD movement and rally it behind Tsvangirai in the Presidential runoff.

Bemused Dr Makoni was advised by the MKD National Executive to read the electoral outcome and salvage the movement’s lost political momentum by openly expressing support for Tsvangirai in the impending Presidential runoff race but Dr Makoni was too attached to President Mugabe to summon the courage to do that.

As a consequence murmurs of discontent started to emerge in MKD. Dabengwa disconnected his link with the MKD and announced he would work for the revival of PF ZAPU instead of enduring the indecisive leadership of MKD by Dr Makoni and alleged fiduciary impropriety in the movement involving vehicle allocation to provinces and accountability for foreign funding received by the MKD leader.

Open desertions and mutiny was inevitable following Dr Makoni’s flopped bid for the Presidency.

Financial Controller of the MKD Dr Nkosana Moyo who once served as a technocrat Minister of Industry in the 2000 Cabinet but quit in a huff and announced his resignation via e-mail was gutted by the developments in the movement and stealthily slipped into the background only to emerge as having been appointed Director of the Africa Development Bank.

Meanwhile the discontent with Dr Makoni’s leadership of the MKD was still simmering under the surface and exploded when the movement’s National Council convened a meeting wherein they resolved to suspend Dr Makoni’s defacto leadership of the movement that he was never elected to.

Dr Makoni was livid and started purging the movement of dissenters in the movement whom he branded as “shadowy characters who had infiltrated the movement with personal enrichment goals that they had failed to realise.”

He pointed that many of his detractors in the movement had run into political association troubles in an apparent reference to Major Kudzayi Mbudzi, Margret Dongo, Ibbo Mandaza and Kindness Paradza.

It was always coming to an ugly fight as Denford Magora and Mike Makoni continued to spearhead the witch hunt and urged Dr Makoni to flush them out.

The MKD leadership dispute has been fast tracked to the courts but the courts refused to grant it an urgent hearing giving Dr Makoni and Magora the time reprieve they were desperately in need of to announce the proposed constitution of the Party and recover from the in-party fighting that had spilled into the public domain.

Magora wants to divert any attention to the negative publicity directed at the MKD to the popular MDC-T.

There is a fundamental reason for that. Within Zimbabwe the political landscape has shifted in MDC-T’s favour so much so that most people believe it will take at least 10 years for the party to lose the majority support it currently enjoys and even then it will take some catastrophic blundering on the part of the Party to lose current support.

Dr Makoni is only too aware of this reality on the ground and has been frequenting his visits to Tsvangirai’s homestead from the time the Premier remained outside the country before he came back to lead his Party into the coalition Government with Mugabe’s Zanu PF and Mutambara’s loathed MDC formation.

Being an in-law relative of the Tsvangirai Dr Makoni was politically relieved when the two tragic funerals presented him any opportunity to draw closer to the Premier by being close to him throughout his bereavement period.

Unbeknown to Magora is the fact that Dr Makoni is trying everything possible to regain the trust of the Premier and be thrown a life saving rope for the drowning MKD project but does not want the MKD national executive to be party to the pact bringing him political salvation even though it is their advice he is trying to pursue.

Further Magora says there is chuckling in Zanu PF corridors of power that the Premier has been subdued by the President in the struggle for power in Zimbabwe’s Coalition government because he is now restricted to ineffective annulments of Presidential decrees stripping the Premier of any powers he thought he held.

He gleefully points to the Provincial Governors, Reserve bank Governor, Attorney General and Permanent Secretaries appointments that the Premier opposed and or annulled but are still in full force and effect as evidence of who between the Premier and the President is the ultimate authority in the State and in Government and says it is Mugabe.

He further alludes to the reported presidential decree to strip the ICT Ministry of its responsibilities as assigned by the Premier and relocate them with confidante minister of Transport and communication as the final straw that broke the Premier’s perceived powerful aura to smithereens and triggered whimsical laughter from Zanu PF and of MKD corridors.

But we dare remind Magora that he who laughs last has the greatest satisfaction and the longest laugh.

Unlike Magora and his handlers in MKD who in 30 years of close association with Mugabe never mastered the art of handling Mugabe’s invincibility, Tsvangirai and the MDC have in one decade matured into the most threatening political formation to Mugabe and the Zanu PF dynasty.

From 2000 when the MDC sniffed the power corridors through gaining the largest Parliamentary representation by any of Mugabe’s and Zanu PF political protagonists since their coming to power in 1980 the MDC has slowly but surely corroded the draconian powers of the octogenarian leader to a point now where it is newsworthy for Magora to write about the President concerning himself with acts to show the extent of his power.

But it is only dimwits like Magora who believe that President Mugabe is still as powerful as he has ever been simply because he has purportedly reassigned functions of a Ministry allocated to the MDC to a Ministry headed by a Zanu PF confidante of the President.

When the President truly wielded the powers that are still awesome to Magora and those of his ilk such public show of power by him was not newsworthy at all as it was the norm rather than the exception that it has now become.

For Magora and MKD’s benefit I can safely disclose to him that the issues he believes are water under the bridge are very much on the agenda of the Coalition government and they will remain so until they have been exhaustively debated and agreed upon in a manner that is the principals in coalition accept as the way best suited for them to achieve the four key objectives they set out to achieve through the unholy union namely;

Democratisation of Zimbabwe, National healing and reconciliation, Humanitarian disaster mitigation and Economic turnaround for the country.

Those are the issues that guide the MDC involvement in the coalition government and not some hopeless flexing of political muscle by key players in the coalition to salvage lost political auras.

And in that respect the MDC has not been found wanting so the whimsical laughter in Zanu PF power corridors may as well continue for now while projects corroding their power irreversibily are being put in place and taking root.

Scheduled elections after the life of the coalition government’s tenure of office will determine who will have the last laugh and how whimsical it will be. We can tell Magora that the laughter will not be from the current places it is emerging from as those corridors are privately worried to the marrow at the pace the coalition is moving towards free and fair elections that may be beyond the capacity of the Military