ZIMBABWE’S last Parliament was reduced to one huge farce as the august House was turned into a circus by Douglas Mwonzora who single-handedly destroyed the country’s once most vibrant opposition party, the MDC Alliance by recalling virtually all opposition Members of Parliament (MPs).
Mwonzora’s handiwork will go down in the annals of history as one of the worst assaults on Zimbabwe’s hopes of becoming a democratic nation.
The same curse seems to have revisited the country’s 10th Parliament as MPs from the two-year-old Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) party — which emerged stronger from Mwonzora’s ruins — are being recalled.
Some character claiming to be the godfather of the young party, Sengezo Tshabangu, has decided to disrupt Parliament business even before the new legislators’ first session.
We hear more such recalls are on the way.
May the good Lord have mercy on us as we are seem to be heading nowhere as a nation. How a country of 16 million people, the majority of whom are among the world’s most educated, is reduced to a vaudeville by some clown in the form of Tshabangu remains a mystery.
Zimbabwe is now a political wreck simply because of some merry Andrews who have little to no respect for people’s rights and wishes.
Zimbabweans went to the polls on August 23 and 24 this year to choose people they reckoned were the best to represent them in Parliament for the next five years.
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It follows that the electorate are the ones who should have the mandate to recall from Parliament whoever they would have elected and not some individuals who emerge from nowhere to ride roughshod over people’s rights.
Such a dire situation calls on us to refrain from engaging in silly intellectual debates about the merits and demerits of this and that which, at the end of the day, aid nothing to promote the people’s wishes.
In our view, it is improper for an individual to simply wake up and disrupt the business of such an important institution as Parliament for personal reasons.
The speed at which Speaker of the National Assembly Jacob Mudenda notified the election management body of the vacancies notwithstanding that CCC had notified Parliament in writing that all their communications would be coming from party leader Nelson Chamisa remains a mystery.
The CCC disowned Tshabangu but that alone was not enough, according to Mudenda.
Tshabangu can have his fun in the sun but the fingerprints behind the chaos can be tracked to the doorstep of a political party that “sponsors” such people.
First, it was a Harare man whose court victory ensured that the 2013 elections went ahead at a time opposition parties were pushing for electoral reforms.
Later, a man from Gokwe also approached the courts arguing Chamisa’s ascendancy as then MDC Alliance leader was in violation of the party’s constitution. This time around, an “interim secretary-general” is throwing out recall letters like confetti. It looks like the circus will be with us for a long time.
