Herald
5 March 2011
By “Nathaniel Manheru”
Cricket or millipede?
Welshman, Oh Welshman!
Much like the proverbial cricket, he continues to kick off his hind legs, forgetting he is not a millipede endowed with a million legs.
He forgets he still has to cross the vlei, to reach the next village.
Obviously, he is an angry customer to Zanu-PF.
The President should have dropped Mutambara as a principal, should have brought him in as a new principal, Ncube bitterly opines.
His actions and those of his traditionally suave and mature Priscilla, smack of bitter self-hurt.
Far more than all, Welshman was most strident against sanctions in the negotiations that gave rise to the GPA, that yielded its fraught anti-sanctions clause.
Far more than all, Priscilla raised needling questions to Europe and America, each time the Cabinet Committee engaged delegations of those power blocs.
Both stances gave MDC some stature, national in scope in my view.
Against both developments, the MDC boycott of the Wednesday petition sticks out as out of character.
It smacked of a perverse hope to revenge on the President and Zanu-PF on the non-inclusion of Welshman as a principal.
But they should have thought through their actions, should have picked on a better moment.
Sanctions do define the politics of this country, for now and for the foreseeable future.
Soko Mufakwose!
I thought Mutambara played it quite skillfully.
He did not attend the launch. No one begrudged him, if you ask me.
But before long, in fact a day later, he pronounced himself unequivocally in support of the removal of sanctions, well away from a function cast as having partisan trappings.
Had he gone to the launch, he would have given Ncube easy victory.
“Ahaa,” Welshman would have said, “you see your Zanu-PF man!”
He didn’t, which is why vaNcube vakaita mufakwose!
Much worse, at the late Lesabe’s funeral, Ncube gave away enough indications of where he is headed politically.
Why would any party worry to court a political minor who is about to be swallowed by another?
It is clear Dabengwa is the man to talk to.
Before long, Welshman will wiggle in Dabengwa’s belly, like the biblical Jonah who chose a different city to one preferred by the Almighty.
Farai Mutsaka and Peter Wonacott quote Ncube as not sure what to tell investors when they ask him if President Mugabe plans to seize their companies.
“I can’t give them any firm assurances.”
I hope he is not about to fail too as a Minister of Government.
Surely if these are investors from those countries in the West which have imposed sanctions, the answer is straightforward: he cannot assure them, naturally, the same way he himself cannot be assured by as to when sanctions will be lifted.
The men who authored Zidera
Welshman has two problems on this one matter.
Alongside Biti and Coltart, he was part of the team that authored sanctions.
As contradictions sharpen, he finds himself in a bind, a worse one for him since at some point, he appeared to have renounced those same sanctions.
Secondly, he believes, alongside many in the MDC formations, that investors only come from the West.
It is a belief against reason, experience and world trends.
Surely the two years he has been sitting in that grand office have shown him the colour of the investor who is bringing in money, or the obverse, the colour of the investor who will not come to Zimbabwe, who is taking away money from us?
His latest deal on Zisco is with Indians.
That suggests that the question that nags him is coming from the West, itself his party’s source market for political capital, literally.
But Welshman will not like this one: asked whether Welshman or Arthur has approached him for advice, Tsvangirai responded by a devastating analogy.
Noting that Arthur would come; that Welshman would never come, he added in respect of the latter: “Nyakudya zvitorobho nhasi wadzipwa neganda remhuru!”
Roughly translated it means the tough one who brags of chewing tough hide, today lies sprawled and gasping, choked by mere veal.
Tsvangirai things the haughty man has met his comeuppance and asks the world as to who divided the MDC in 2004/5.
And MDC’s drift towards Zapu simply consolidates Tsvangirai and Dell’s view of Welshman.
Divided advice
I said Tsvangirai has no advisors.
More correctly put, he has, only poor and disagreeing ones.
On boycotting the event, Biti took the lead, including selling the idea of a Press conference after the launch, at which Tsvangirai was made to mumble incoherences.
Senior media advisors were opposed to the approach which made the MDC-T leader look more foolish, more treacherous.
But the dilemma for Tsvangirai was real.
Coming would have meant fitting within a campaign frame of Zanu-PF.
Not coming, as he did, means he is not just the source of sanctions, but the reason for their continuation in the present and future.
He validated WikiLeaks and worse things we have always heard attributed to him.