Zimeye
By Talent Gondo
10th June 2019
Newly elected secretary general for the MDC led by Nelson Chamisa, Charlton Hwende has revealed that the party is crafting a robust conflict management strategy as a way of ensuring unity in the party.
In an interview with the Newsday, Hwende said:
If you fail to plan, then plan to fail. We need to do things differently. We’ve a five-year mandate and my immediate task is to kickstart the process of developing a five-year results-based strategic plan, a blue-print which will define our path to power towards 2023 or earlier as well as articulate the technical and administrative competencies required to achieve our strategic objectives.
Nestled in the five-year strategic plan are short-term milestones. These will include a rapid assessment of the party’s administrative performance in the last five years, focusing primarily on two questions: i) What is working and why?, and, ii) What is not working and why? Or what can we do differently?
This process will help us co-create a shared vision and plan of action for the technical arm of the party. We need to make strategic choices among competing priorities. And we can only do this if we’ve a strategy and plan in place. We are a learning movement.
We’ve a winning team, under the able leadership of a turn-around strategist, Advocate Chamisa. We’re part of the solution holders to the deep-seated, multi-faceted crisis facing our motherland. Our past performance in government is a public secret.
Our president was voted best minister for his work in the ICT ministry; Honourable Tendai Biti is without doubt the best-ever Finance minister to lead the Treasury; Senator David Coltart did exceptionally well in the Primary and Secondary Education portfolio; so did Professor Welshman Ncube in the Industry and Commerce ministry and Honourable Paurina Mpariwa as Labour minister.
We had a structural issue, which has its roots in the labour movement, our mother. The founding MDC constitution was heavily influenced by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions constitution, which has a very powerful office of secretary-general. This is a norm in most labour movements.
We’ve addressed this structural issue through constitutional amendments, which basically re-calibrated the balance of power to reflect the political reality, that the president is the head of our party. Conflicts are inevitable. In addition to the constitutional reforms, we are also working on developing a robust conflict management and resolution framework, a systemic tool to manage internal contradictions in the party.
The office of the SG is a complex technical and administrative construct with an institutional mandate to help the president and the leadership collective to effectively turn the party’s vision and mission into a path to a power programme of action. I’ll turn my relationship with the president and the leadership collective into a partnership to help the party continue to win elections and, more importantly, transform people’s lives. Our people are suffering and they need solutions.