(HERALD) MDC-T: When a fool and his power soon part ways

MDC-T: When a fool and his power soon part ways
Friday, 16 December 2011 00:00

Reared within a martial milieu, Chinua Achebe's Okonkwo mischaracterised his father for an utter failure, a man to be shunned at all times. Yet Unoka, Okonkwo's father, was not a failure. His real tragedy was that he was an aesthete in the age of the sword and of war. His world had a different yardstick, another value. He hated war, and thus became a loser in an ethos of warriors. He loved those arts which got whole communities to convoke, converge and celebrate life in unison. War divided.

Martial heroism was individualistic and often life-denying. That made the warlike world unattractive to a man to whom the sound of the flute spelt blessedness and peace. But Okonkwo being Okonkwo, anything short of a flaming sword smacked of utter failure, indeed passed for a forbidding model. And that forbidding model was found in his very home, indeed was his own father Unoka who never brought a single trophy from any war, Unoka whose granaries always bared their bottom in utter emptiness when the rest of the villages showed and paraded fat yams, yams the size of an overgrown human head.

For Okonkwo, failure was home, was so overbearingly close. It revulsed him, thereby creating a compensatory martial reflex in him. He had to be seen to be a man of steel, a man of the sword, ready to take risk, preferably single-handedly against all odds, however enormous.

Like a hammer-wielding carpenter, everything looked like a nail head. It had to be knocked in, driven in by a hammer, all with uncharacteristic or oversized ardour. The hammer was an all-time solution, whatever the size of the problem.

When fear commits an abomination

That won him awe; that won him fearful admiration. Above all, it personally won him remarkable tragedy, particularly when he chose to make do with a sword for all seasons, make do with a martial response even where mere compassion was needed.
When Ikemefuna, the ill-fated, sacrificial boy who had called him father fled to him for protection, he responded with a swift, deadly blow that sundered the hapless boy still and cold.

His raging urge to be viewed as a man of steel, a man of unflinching courage and decisiveness, had in fact offended and vitiated against a cardinal value of Umuofia which forbade the killing by one of anyone who called one father. The example of fear and indecisiveness, an example which his own father incarnated, had driven him into committing the abominable sin for which an inglorious suicide would be the only remedy.

Complex in overdrive

But even before this abomination, Achebe had shown Okonkwo in lower but illustrative skirmishes with this overbearingly tragic complex. Coming from a lusterless hunt, empty handed, he sought compensation for this failure by high-handedly admonishing his wives for "killing" a banana tree.

Far from killed, the banana tree was a well and healthy, its dark green lives swaying leisurely in the gentle wind, branches bowing with plenty. Clearly his was aggression sought provocation, a martial urge hungry for a spectacular display. It got worse, much worse for his young wife Ekwefi, who made the near-fatal mistake of murmuring about guns that never shot! Murmured against a man who had returned home from a hunt, empty handed, Ekwefi had recklessly stood between a bear and its anger.

Okonkwo loaded his gun, took aim in the direction of his offending wife, and squeezed the trigger to a loud echo that rang across the whole village, supported by a chorus of wailing hysteria from a suitably terrified team of Okonkwo's concubines. A minute after this raucous rupture, all stood silent and still, only broken by fitful sobs from a frightened but unhurt Ekwefi.

As with the hunt, Okonkwo had missed his target, again, itself yet another instance of glaring yet insufferable failure. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe explores a debilitating complex thrust into overdrive, one hurtling a lofty personality headlong to a tragic end.

Crossing after the bridge

After weeks of bruising media coverage of the Prime Minister and his many women, the MDC-T party may have ear-marked this week as a comeback week, a week of regaining initiative and overwriting the demeaning story of grinning zips and knickers in an age of restraint.

And the Prime Minister's party chose Parliament as the locale for such a comeback.
This drive has lifted the Inclusive Government to a new and dizzy echelon of dysfunctionality. Of course the backdrop was built elsewhere, well away from the Prime Minister and his party.

Welshman Ncube, the other leader of the other MDC faction, thought he was doing himself and his party a favour by expelling the few MPs his party thought it had in Parliament. The idea was for him to create a situation where he could force these affected MPs to formally cross a floor they had long jumped past and over anyway, all to join the other side, that of the Prime Minister and his MDC-T party.

Once that happened, so our man from Wales thought, his party would then formally notify Parliament that the affected MPs had crossed the floor, much against the laws and rules of the august house. Like Tracy Mutinhiri of Zanu- PF, our good professor hoped the affected MPs would then be frozen out of the House. And with the insurance of no by-election stance of the GPA, this was a risk-free course.

Mutambara, MDC-T's warehouse

I cannot say he miscalculated. I am sure he knew the dissident MPs would formalise their membership to MDC-T which they had long joined at the start of the Inclusive Government anyway, if not well before. The move helped this learned man force these turncoats don and assume their real colours.

That far it worked. The move helped create a new dilemma for Mutambara, himself a contestant to MDC leadership. That far it, too, worked. And with both, Ncube is free to reorganise and organise a party in readiness for elections which are expected in June 2012 at the latest. But beyond that, all was disaster for the lawyer-politician. He cannot win, and he knows that.

Cleverly, the disowned, renegade MPs flew into Mutambara's unclenching arms, thereby surviving on the legal and leadership ambiguities pitting MDC's warring leadership. But at heart, they remain MDC-T to the core, with Mutambara incapable of owning, let alone running them.

And the Bench weighs in

Then we did not have the Justice Kamocha judgment, strangely delivered on the good judge's behalf by a fellow judge, one Justice Mathonsi who is a blood relative of the complainant, Welshman Ncube. The Bench must be careful, very careful not to invite needless questions especially in a case of such a clear high profile. That judgment handed down defeat to Mutambara, lifted up Welshman Ncube and what remains of his MDC.

So the rebel MPs were warehoused in Mutambara's threadbare camp, in the process creating a dilemma for Mutambara who is now being viewed in Zanu-PF as playing armoury to an otherwise de-commissioned, ineffectual weapon of the MDC-T. For a law professor who had donated Mutambara to Zanu-PF, this was done to good effect. Give it to him.

Ncube on the offensive?

Whatever consanguineous links between Judge Mathonsi and Ncube, one wants to believe Ncube had no presentiment of the judgment on his leadership wrangle with Mutambara. The judgment itself is Judge Kamocha's, after all. The Thursday judgment has now created a new situation, both for the rebel MPs and for Mutambara.

After the judgment, Mutambara can no longer lay claim to the leadership of MDC-N, the only party which is recognised in Parliament and by the GPA. He can only seek to contest it by way of an appeal to the Supreme Court, as indeed he says he will. So the rebel MPs can no longer claim to be in Parliament on Mutambara's ticket, on a Mutambara parading symbolically as leader of MDC-M, albeit without owning it.

They have to formally cross the floor, or posthumously seek to contest their dismissal from MDC-N, which will be legally fatal. Ncube can now proceed to notify the Speaker of Parliament, himself an MDC-T official whose role in causing and profiting from these defections is well known.

Mutambara's dilemma

And if Mutambara's hope is to freeze matters by noting an appeal, he faces a real dilemma of a choice between giving succour to MDC-T through this warehouse facility he has granted them, or dismantling that warehouse which is beginning to hurt Zanu-PF through skewed voting on motions in Parliament.

In fact it's worse. Advertently or inadvertently, Mutambara has undermined the very principle of wielding a balancing vote on which the Inclusive Government was founded.
The impact on Zanu-PF has been potentially hurtful, even though no damage has been levied so far. Would Mutambara want to extend the life of a warehouse facility that damages Zanu-PF which can, overnight through its leader, terminate his career as Deputy Prime Minister, itself the only thread fastening him to the whole political edifice?

And of course by not appealing he will have precipitated the ouster of the rebel MPs, conceded defeat to Ncube, all to worse outcomes for the Prime Minister, his party and himself. That takes me to my main point.

Flaunting transient power

I said the MDC-T designated this week as its comeback week after a debilitating coverage on their leader's dashing, totem-less sexuality. The party has sought to do that through Parliament by way of two motions: one against the Clerk of Parliament Austin Zvoma, the hatred of whom by the MDC-T is quite fathomable; two against the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe (BAZ) and its allocation of licenses for national radio to Zimpapers and AB Communications.

Buoyed by the rebel MPs from MDC-N, lately the MDC-T has been wagging its Parliamentarian tail. It has been sponsoring motions no so much to get the august House to engage and debate issues constructively, but to flaunt its majority in the Lower House and to legitimise a skewed vote which it knows must decide issues in the end.

It has the numbers in the Lower House; it has the Speaker in the chair. It has looked formidable, at the very least for these few weeks. And for the few weeks, it has flaunted this new found power so much and so recklessly that it did not see ruin stealing on it.

Confirming Zvoma's need

Much worse, it has not been able to flaunt that power with finesse, in the process raising a whole ogre of unconstitutional waywardness, aggravated by sheer incompetence. Tellingly, it is a type of incompetence which vividly recalls the failings of its leader and his staff.

First, the Zvoma case. I cannot visualise an employment structure which takes the whole of Parliament as the employer of a mere officer, however senior. It is unprecedented; it is legally unfeasible.

One might be employed by Government in the abstract sense, but one is engaged by the Public Service Commission. And to imagine that Cabinet sits to decide termination of a civil servant is remarkably ridiculous. To imagine that Parliament opens a debate on an employe with the goal of deciding his employment fate is just amazing. And that such senselessness took place this week in Parliament clearly shows how unready an MDC-T-dominated Parliament is to do without the profound advice of Zvoma. And this un-readiness has shown itself in a way that exposes Parliament as vulnerable to men and women of ill-will, spite and vindictiveness, indeed that shows Parliament as very susceptible, if not a bad employer who assesses performance on politics rather than on merit.

Flouting a greater principle

And Zvoma complicated matters for Parliament. He went to court. He, in other words, approached Parliament's checking and balancing institution by way of the Judiciary. This complicating insertion came well before spiteful MPs had exhausted their ardour, thereby generating an immense, unstoppable momentum that recklessly hurtled the whole institution against a forbidding outward legal fact. The debate proceeded regardless and a motion was still passed on a matter already lodged with the Bench for arbitration. At that point Zvoma ceased to be an issue. What became the issue was Parliament itself, the MDC-T MPs who had whipped themselves into frenzied overdrive, and of course the Inclusive Government and its myriad susceptibilities. With a surfeit of lawyers, MDC-T should have known when to stop, all to redeem itself. It didn't, which is why one sees clear analogy with Okonkwo. Having been consigned to margins and powerless, the MDC-T seized on an ephemeral power conjunction to compensate for this erstwhile powerlessness. And it did so with the restraint of Okonkwo, in the process offending against more decisive sensitivities, not least of them the foundational principles upon which the doctrine of separation of powers rests. An abomination has thus been committed in Parliament, thanks to the incompetence which only the MDC-T alone is capable of. Are we glimpsing at the future with an MDC-T at the helm? Or, as the Prime Minister eruditely and flauntingly told Chief Negomo through Selby Hwacha and his boys, is the Bench about to be told that it has no jurisdiction and should never seek to try its "superiors"?

Why all the calories?

Then you have the BAZ issue. Repeatedly we were told during the debate on the matter that the BAZ Board is "unconstitutionally" constituted. I am still at a loss how a creature of a mere statute is capable of offending against the Constitution of a country, merely by the circumstances of its creation or being. Or how Parliament becomes the proper setting for remedying such an abomination? Or how those who claim harm from BAZ's "unconstitutional" conduct ever find relief from a mere administrative court? So Parliament moves a motion to get BAZ dissolved, more to flaunt votes than to cause dissolution of BAZ. And after the vote has been taken, with all gladiators panting for breath, chief whips of the contesting parties agree in perfect unison uncharacteristic of the preceding debate that indeed the motion itself has no effect on BAZ or on the Ministry with an oversight role. So why all the calories? And the amount of ignorance exhibited during the debate! Cry my beloved country! The dishonesty involved in pushing arguments which fly right into the face of documented facts! Cry, cry my beloved country!

Much ado about nothing

Much worse, no one reminded the august House that Parliament was behaving unconstitutionally through pushing a motion which had nothing to do with the constitution, or with the lawful role designated for Parliament itself in a proper, functioning democracy. Again, you got the sense of a House sorely missing its Clerk. BAZ is an arm of the Executive. It is an instrument of executing policy, itself the domain of the Executive. Just how the Legislature seeks the dissolution of an implementation arm of the Executive, hardly anyone can ever fathom. How Parliament challenges the putting together of that arm, ahead of the Judiciary whose bounden duty is to test the legality of such bodies, again hardly anyone can ever fathom. Much worse, how that debate still must proceed in spite of an approach to the Bench by one of the applicants, again, again no one can explain. It was a massive show of much ado about nothing. Not by Parliament, but by parliamentarians. You cannot fault the responsible Ministry of watching the whole charade equanimously.

Sharp teeth on soft tissue

And the keen reader has seen that both cases cited above hinge on MDC-T's conduct before it gets power, more accurately the crimes it already commits with very little power conceded it. In the first place it is itself part of the Executive and yet seeks to undermine that arm of Government. Secondly, it is in the Legislature yet seeks to abuse Parliament by both turning it into a vehicle for reversing losses suffered elsewhere, and by overreaching. Thirdly it claims to believe in the rule of law and yet it seeks to undermine that Bench by new and even more worrisome conduct which makes its leader's snubbing of Chief Negomo's court an ominous sub-plot for worse things to come in the main act. Lastly and much worse, this whole conduct shows how unwieldy and un-neat power becomes when exercise by people whose brains pull down together with their loose zips! To what may have begun as a lofty quest for heroic recovery and honour, the week has closed with a limping Okonkwo, mortally hurt not heroically by an enemy blow in battle, but bathetically by an embittered hooker sneaked into camp, settling an unsettled bill through sharp teeth on soft tissue.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

I wonder if the MDC-T sees the larger picture. It is spewing up evidence and spectacular examples of the sheer dysfunctionality of the Inclusive Government. And that dysfunctionality is beginning to threaten other arms of State. The MDC-T must never think that Zanu (PF) will continue to be entertained by this noisy pantomime.

Quite the contrary, Zanu (PF) eagerly watches these hefty failures, all the time waiting for that day the scales will tilt decisively, justifying the equally eagerly awaited conclusion that enough is enough. This thing cannot work. Back to the people, please. That way, a fool and his ill-gotten, pilfered power shall be made to part. Icho!

nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw