Maravi

(HERALD) Stayaway: Morgan plays last card, loses

Stayaway: Morgan plays last card, loses
By Caesar Zvayi

ON the way to work yesterday morning, this writer was intrigued to see all shops along Nelson Mandela Avenue, the road home to Harvest House, the MDC-T headquarters, open for business as usual. The picture was the same throughout the grid between Julius Nyerere Way to the West and First Street to the East, George Silundika Avenue to the South and Kwame Nkrumah Avenue to the North. All shops were open for business including those facing and flanking Harvest House.

Early morning shoppers and workers were going about their business as usual but conspicuous by their absence were the usual lumpen elements who mill around Harvest House and of course, the riot police which always keeps an eye on them whenever MDC-T leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, calls for his habitual abortive stayaways.

A visitor to Zimbabwe would, no doubt, have been surprised to learn that the main opposition MDC-T, yes OPPOSITION for that is precisely what MDC-T is till the day it posts a decisive victory against Zanu-PF, had called for an indefinite job stayaway in a bid to instigate the unconstitutional removal of the Government after failing to do so through the ballot on March 29.

This writer later learnt this was the picture throughout the capital and all other urban centres to which Tsvangirai lays claim to as his centres of power.

Urbanites had simply ignored Tsvangirai’s call for a job stayaway ostensibly aimed at forcing the Government ‘‘to respect the ‘will’ of the people.’’

As early as 11am, some of the MDC-T’s staunchest allies had to swallow their pride and concede that the stayaway had been a huge flop.

Newzimbabwe.com had "MDC strike flops, media blackout blamed" saying in part; ‘‘A general strike called by Zimbabwe’s opposition to force the release of last month’s presidential election results got off to a slow start today with shops in the capital operating as normal. While BBC quipped with "Muted response to Zimbabwe strike" saying; ‘‘Many Zimbabwean businesses open as usual despite opposition calls for a strike over undeclared poll results.’’ CNN had the word stayaway in quotes.

In trying to justify the calls for a stayaway, Tsvangirai’s vice-president, Thokozani Khupe had this to say on Monday, the eve of the envisioned D-Day: ‘‘We are calling on the people of Zimbabwe to speak against ZEC’s failure to release the results. We are calling for a mass stay-away until the results are released," Khupe told a Press conference minutes after the High Court dismissed, with costs, MDC-T’s application to compel ZEC to release presidential election results before verification and recounting.

While Khupe’s statement would appear to be a logical response by a competitor keen to know how he/she performed in the election, she gave the game away in the next breath where she said MDC-T had hoped the High Court would compel ZEC to announce the results ‘‘and end an election deadlock that could lead to violence and bloodshed.’’

And therein, dear reader, lies the real objective of the abortive stayaway. It was supposed to set the stage for, and abet Gordon Brown and George W. Bush’s attempts to have Zimbabwe on the agenda of the UN Security Council that meets today at the Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in New York.

Bush and Brown, who claimed the ‘‘world’’ was losing patience with Zimbabwe, were hard-pressed to have Zimbabwe declared a threat to regional and international peace and security as a prelude to a military invasion that would enable them to sneak Tsvangirai to the Presidency while simultaneously herding President Mugabe off to The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity.

Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa’s Lusaka Summit, held under the aegis of Sadc, was supposed to deodorise the lie that Zimbabwe was a regional security threat.

Prior to what is now known as Levy’s Summit, Tsvangirai had released a statement calling on the US to invade Zimbabwe in the manner it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq saying the Western rabble rousers could not afford to stand akimbo on Zimbabwe.

Gushed Tsvangirai: ‘‘How can global leaders espouse the values of democracy yet when they are being challenged fail to open their mouths? Why is it that a supposed ‘war on terror’ ignores the very real terror of broken minds and mangled bodies that lie along the trail left by (President) Mugabe?"

The MDC-T’s thuggish elements euphemistically dubbed "Democratic Resistance Committees" were supposed to provide the mangled bodies and broken limbs after descending on those reporting for work. The gangs were at work in various high-density suburbs barricading roads, stoning vehicles and threatening works on their way to work. Fortunately, ZRP officers were on top of the situation.

And of course, little Chamisa had painted the gory picture with scandalous scenarios claiming Zimbabwe would be gripped by ‘‘Rwanda-style’’ massacres if there was no intervention in Zimbabwe.

All this constitutes the MDC-T’s scenario B proposed in the scandalous transition document titled, The Transition Strategy, prepared by Tendai Mbiti, sorry Biti as Tsvangirai’s roadmap to State House. The document contains chilling details of the party’s plans to subvert the electoral process and destabilise Zimbabwe with the aid of their western overlords.

This writer, along with progressive Zimbabweans, waits to see how Bush and Brown can sell the idea that Zimbabwe is an international peace and security threat when they were not similarly inclined when over 2 000 Kenyans were killed in cold blood while over 650 000 others were displaced in post-poll violence that gripped Kenya in the wake of the disputed re-election of incumbent president Mwai Kibaki on December 27.

Anyway lying and attempting to give the West a foothold into Zimbabwe has been the MDC-T strategy since the launch of the united MDC on September 11 1999, a dark day for Zimbabwe as it was to be for the US three years latter.

But the bottom line is the spectacular flop of the attempted stayaway has exposed Tsvangirai’s claims that he enjoys popular support in Harare in particular, and Zimbabwe in general.

It also exposed for a farce, Tsvangirai’s claims that he is the custodian of the peoples’ emotions. The man has been waxing lyrical over the past few days claiming Zimbabweans were outraged at the ‘‘theft’’ of their victory by the Government. The stayaway was supposed to give expression to that ‘‘outrage’’, and as we all know now, that was not to be, and the question is: How can Tsvangirai claim victory, let alone supremacy in Harare when urbanites spurn him time and again?

Whose agenda was the stayaway supposed to serve? Was it meant to serve opposition supporters in Budiriro or Bush and Brown’s attempt to take their war games to Zimbabwe to accomplish what the illegal sanctions and a captive opposition have failed to do over the past nine years?

This writer is confident, Zimbabweans saw through Tsvangirai’s mask to Brown’s dour visage particularly as Tsvangirai himself has gone into self-imposed exile in Botswana while his children are scattered in South Africa and Australia.

Tsvangirai is all the more poorer today for the simple reason that he has played his last card, and has been found wanting. The fact that he has been ignored in his purported stronghold spells doom for his chances to mobilise popular support in the event of a presidential run-off.

But Tsvangirai only has himself to blame as he has been told time and again that mass actions or stayaways as coercive instruments are simply untenable in Zimbabwe as the MDC does not have the ideological connection it believes it has with the majority of urbanites.

Secondly, whose child, father or mother did he want to sacrifice when his children and himself are safely tucked elsewhere while others are supposed to be waging the ‘‘liberation struggle’’ here. Old habits die hard indeed for this is the same man who fled the liberation struggle to boost Rhodesia’s GDP in the mines of Bindura, claiming that he needed the $15 wage he was given to feed his family. But as we heard latter old man Chibwe Tsvangirai, whose loins sired the Trojan horse, disputed that claim.

Thirdly, thanks to the illegal sanctions that depressed industry, the majority of Zimbabweans are in the informal sector. They have ownership of their small to medium scale enterprises hence to them heeding Tsvangirai’s hysterics over stayaways would be akin to staying away from themselves.

It is important to note that this is the same informal sector Tsvangirai says he plans to disband in the event he attains power as he is for ‘‘job creation through formal employment in the big industries. There will be no informal sector of any kind under our administration, especially where this threatens the interests of our international partners.’’

In other words, Tsvangirai and MDC-T are against black empowerment, they are against blacks owning their own businesses but are for seeing them in the employ of big business, which big business is monopolised by British companies.

To simplify it further, Tsvangirai wants to see all Zimbabweans join him in the employ of the British. Now which self-respecting Zimbabwean can listen to him?

This writer rests his case.

Labels: CADRES, MDC, MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, STRIKE

posted by MrK @ 7:04 PM