Opposition leader Nelson Chamisa has got his fair share of rabid critics, but he also has very fervent and sometimes cultic supporters.
What I have found in such circumstances is that there is no room for middle ground and often people are thrown into two camps; it is either you are against him or for him and there is nothing in between.
This is the tragedy of Zimbabwe, where it is difficult to ask questions about or to someone because you will be placed in one basket or another, when maybe you actually belong to neither.
I must confess, when Chamisa launched the CCC in 2022, I thought his “strategic ambiguity” was a clever and innovative plan.
If the idea was to stop infiltration of his party by the ruling Zanu PF and all its manifestations, then strategic ambiguity was clever.
However, my thinking was this should not go on in perpetuity but rather as a short term plan while plugging existing gaps or foolproofing for the future.
Political parties need guardrails that govern how each member relates with the whole; they govern how members of the party are disciplined and removed from the collective.
Guardrails are also important in that they protect the organisation from being hijacked by either the members or the leader who may seek to usurp more power than is due to him or her.
This is where my gripe with CCC is, the lack of guardrails opened the door for Sengezo Tshabangu – who declared himself the interim secretary general – to hijack the party.
More on that in a bit.
The lack of guardrails was apparent during the nomination exercise, where lawyer Freddy Masarirevhu supposedly went against the party and was nominated as a candidate.
This meant that the party fielded double candidates in the affected constituency, harming its prospects of winning the seat.
At the risk of beating a worn out drum, questions were asked about the lack of structures in CCC and how this harmed them.
However, my issue is that shortly after Masarirevhu caused the double candidature, CCC moved in immediately and expelled him from the party.
But across the country Tshabangu was cooking something more sinister for the party but went largely unmolested.
I know the easy thing to say is that Tshabangu is a Zanu PF plant – that may or may not be true – but that is not the issue here.
When Tshabangu first came to the limelight in 2023, Chamisa claimed not to know him and argued that he was an imposter.
A lot of people were livid at Tshabangu and failed to scrutinise Chamisa’s statements, which were clearly untrue.
Chamisa knew Tshabangu long before the 2023 elections, as they had met several times.
Soon enough, images of the two popped out on social media, but these were easy to rebut, as Chamisa could claim that as a national leader he took pictures with several people, some of them unknown to him.
However, ask anyone in opposition political circles in Bulawayo, they will tell you that Chamisa attended several closed door meetings in the city some of which were chaired by the person that was described as an imposter.
I have it on good authority that when wind first got out that Tshabangu had malevolent intentions, Chamisa was warned and advised to deal with the issue before it got out of hand.
In response, Chamisa said he had the issue under control and that he did not think it was major.
This was before elections by the way. Chamisa’s lieutenants were also warned about the threat that Tshabangu posed, but they also ignored it, waving it off as a non-issue.
Then Tshabangu struck. Again, the response was, in my opinion, muted.
Masarirevhu was shown the door for merely causing a double candidacy in St Mary’s, yet here was Tshabangu’s posing an existential threat to the party and the only response was that he was an unknown imposter.
After Tshabangu’s first recall and seeing that the speaker of Parliament was inclined to accept this, a question I ask myself is why did the party not sit down and immediately suspend or expel Tshabangu.
No, they waited for him to cause more damage hoping that they would delegitimise him by saying he was unknown and praying that eventually he would go away.
CCC and Chamisa put their faith in the courts – the very same courts that they had long disparaged – hoping that eventually a judge would rule in their favour.
Even when it was clear where the tide was going, they stubbornly stuck to their guns and filed one futile court case after the other.
The Tshabangu issue needed a political solution. The lack of guardrails in the CCC had opened the door for him and being the opportunist that he clearly is, he slalomed right through it.
I do not think Tshabangu was ever the acting secretary general, but to say he was unknown in the party is the highest level of dishonesty.
CCC should have considered the first recalls and the first court ruling as water under the bridge and instead went after Tshabangu politically by expelling him from the party rather than pretend he did not exist.
They fired Masarirevhu, so they also could have expelled Tshabangu, but they chose not to.
While strategic ambiguity may initially have been clever, ultimately it should have had a sunset clause, with the party restructuring itself for the future, not just short term for elections.
Tshabangu was a beneficiary of the lack of guardrails.