Sunday Independent (SA)
By Maureen Isaacson
May 04 2008
Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is not Tom Cruise. Tendai Biti, the MDC secretary-general and one of Zimbabwe’s top lawyers, says Tsvangirai, the former mineworker who looks set to rule Zimbabwe, is no actor, nor is he manipulative in the way that politicians often are.
When the MDC split because of Tsvangirai’s decision to vote against the introduction of the senate to the houses of parliament in October 2003, Biti was forced to choose between the leadership of Tsvangirai and the leader of the faction, Arthur Mutambara.
“I chose Morgan because he is a human being with very strong points and weak points also. If he makes mistakes you know they are bona fide and this draws loyalty out of people. What you see is what you get,” says Biti.
Our political proclivities determine what we see and Mugabe’s people did a good job of discrediting Tsvangirai. But even as the crisis over the March election rages, (despite the MDC’s clear win), we are undoubtedly looking at a winner.
Tsvangirai has brought 99 seats to parliament, while Mutambara’s faction gained 10. Together this makes a majority and it means that Mugabe has no power to vote for a national budget, no small feat; certainly a vindication for Tsvangirai.
This week after the two MDC factions united against the repressive regime, Mutambara said in an interview: “…given the attempts by [Robert] Mugabe to sabotage the votes of the people, we are closing ranks and saying we are going to work together in defending the people’s vote. On March 27, we voted for change. Morgan Tsvangirai is the embodiment of that change.”
Tsvangirai embodies revolution. He has always spoken truth to power. He took on Mugabe, and was, with Arhcbishop Pius Ncube in the 1980s and Edgar Tekere in the 1990s, a singularly powerful voice of opposition. The son of a bricklayer, the eldest of nine children, he was forced to abandon his education to support his family. This was possibly the making of Tsvangirai, but it has also been his albatross.
His character and leadership are under scrutiny – on the continent, where he has moved under the shadow of Mugabe’s Pan-Africanism – and at home where struggle credentials were valued as highly as the tertiary education he lacked. He was made to suffer by Mugabe because he had not fought in the chimurenga war: the Struggle for Independence.
In 1972, in Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, job reservation for whites was in place. But the white men had gone to war with Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) soldiers and Tsvangirai got a job in a textile factory, where his union work began.
In a 1990 interview with Richard Saunders, a Canadian academic turned journalist and researcher, Tsvangirai said: “I was one of the few, maybe 10 or so, “lucky” blacks to have been offered a “white” job at the mine.
“I worked at Trojan [mine] from 1975 to 1985, but within that period I had risen up to the rank of plant foreman, almost up to the level of general foreman of the plant, which was considered a middle management position.”
He has not lost that common touch. He is powerful and he is popular – for his empathy as well as for his errors. Solomon “Sox” Chikohwero, the vice chairman of the Zimbabwe Diaspora Forum, who was the MDC’s head of intelligence until 2003, says: “I don’t know if Morgan is a Christian – he acts like a Christian, though I have never seen him going to church. If he finds something on someone he takes a long time to act on it. He is empathetic, as if he was always trying to feel how I am feeling.”
Daniel Molokele, a human rights lawyer who, as head of the student union of the University of Zimbabwe in 1997, worked with Tsvangirai when he was the secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), is less flattering: “At the moment he is the only credible leader to challenge Mugabe but that does not mean we should treat him like an angel. He is not holy, he is not infallible, he is not the pope.
“He is affable and has a good personality. You can work with him, but he is not a decisive leader and as a chairperson he does not come across as a strong leader.”
For a time, recently, after the refusal of President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF to release the election results, Tsvangirai went into hiding, leaving Biti to face the music. Biti made it plain that the movement “was not in exile but in transition”. Tsvangirai has been criticised for this absence, unfairly, given the violent tactics of Zanu-PF, say those close to him.
There have been problems. But you cannot forget, says Brian Raftopolous, who worked closely with Tsvangirai at the end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, that Tsvangirai has led the party, which he merged from the trade unions and civic organisations, in the most difficult of circumstances and managed to shift people from a liberation movement.”
Raftopolous, who is the programme manager of Transitional Justice in Africa at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, says Tsvangirai has been immensely brave. “He has the capacity to win the people over. He has a very good touch with ordinary people. He relates to people’s struggles and has had problems with intellectuals in his party as have many political parties on the continent.”
In May 2006, at a Mutambara faction rally in London, Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga, a Harare MP, accused Tsvangirai of having failed to respect the party’s constitution. She said he had used coercion and violence to hold onto his position, Mugabe-style.
Welshman Ncube, the MDC’s former secretary-general who joined Mutambara’s MDC, said that 24 youths had been recruited as a kind of mini-army to defend Tsvangirai’s cause. Two months previously, David Coltart, an MDC senator and shadow justice minister, left Tsvangirai’s faction to join Mutambara’s. Coltart says that he disagreed with Tsvangirai’s handling of intra-party violence. “I did not accuse him of being personally involved in the violence. I felt that he was not direct enough in stamping it out,” he said.
Raftopolous says the violence within the MDC should be seen within the wider context of Zanu-PF’s repression and violence. In response to its own organisational problems, the MDC set up its structures along parallel lines with Zanu-PF’s, he says. Still it faced problems with accountability, corruption, uncontained violence and tribalism. These, and problems with Tsvangirai’s “kitchen cabinet”, are on the table.
But, these are stressful times for the MDC. And Tsvangirai has concentrated on – and virtually succeeded in – getting Mugabe out of power.
George Bizos, the advocate who defended Tsvangirai in his high-profile treason trial in 2004 in Harare, says that Tsvangirai’s political nous is evident in the fact that he has resisted resorting to violence in the face of Zanu-PF’s attacks.
“He understands his constituency, is in touch with what the people want,” says Bizos. “Like [the late] Walter Sisulu, with whom he has in common a limited education, he is street smart. He is intelligent, but his lateral intelligence is less developed than Sisulu’s, but nonetheless is there,” says Bizos.
The treason trial essentially was the result of a set up. Tsvangirai, Ncube and Renson Gasela, the shadow agriculture minister, had been contracted by Ari Ben-Menashe, whom Bizos describes as an Israeli “professional fraudster”. Unbeknown to Tsvangirai, Ben-Menashe had already been hired by Mugabe. According to Tsvangirai, Ben-Menashe invited him to a meeting to discuss fundraising. Unbeknown to him the conversation was being videotaped. When Ben-Menashe mentioned plans to “eliminate Mugabe”, Tsvangirai became suspicious and immediately left. On the basis of doctored evidence from the video, Tsvangirai was charged with treason.
“He [Ben-Menashe] held himself out as a former Mossad agent, an arms dealer, a commodity merchant and influential peddler, all of which our clients had naively believed was true”, Bizos wrote in his 2007 autobiography, Odyssey to Freedom.
Bizos says: “In the witness box Tsvangirai was brutally honest with himself, he paid tribute to Mugabe for his role in the liberation struggle.” He had after all started out in Zanu-PF, before Mugabe’s aversion to trade unions became apparent.
Saunders remembers Tsvangirai in the 1980s as “a brave, charismatic figure. Morgan was younger and more dynamic. He managed to get people to rally around him. Strategically he was always thinking ahead all the time and was willing to compromise with his enemies.”
My own impressions of Tsvangirai bear out this bravery. He was the secretary general of the ZCTU when I interviewed him in August 1999. It was the week after the union had endorsed the national MDC, which had been formed that May as a broad civic movement, but not yet as a formal political party. Tsvangirai was among the leadership candidates.
He pointed out the sheer drop from his 10th floor office in Chester House in Harare’s Speke Avenue. The previous December he had almost been thrown out of the window. He was beaten by men who he was certain were sent by Mugabe.
In 1989, he was detained repeatedly. Among his alleged sins was the accusation of spying for the South African government. “I have grown used to harassment. I don’t care if I get killed. We cannot live like this, we cannot go on being so poor.”
In 1990 inflation was soaring, to what was considered an intolerable 63,7 percent and the International Monetary Fund was getting anxious and calling for a cutback of 30 percent. Current unofficial estimates place inflation for the year to April 2008 at higher than 400 000 percent.
I had asked Tsvangirai then if Zimbabwe was on the brink of revolution. “Of course,” he’d answered.
The fruits of that revolution have yet to be realised. The land issue that Tsvangirai earmarked in 1999 is yet to be resolved. He spoke specifically in our interview about the consideration of skills in land redistribution.
Tsvangirai was pleasant, respectful, very sympathetic. He apologised profusely that the lift at Chester House was broken and that I had walked the 10 flights to his office. He was warm, accessible.
He was focused. He answered the questions. He did not flaunt the knowledge I have learned he has in good measure. Tsvangirai, by the account of those in the know, reads widely, focusing on the lives of leaders, in particular on Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton. He is an avid reader of The Economist, New African and Newsweek, and newspapers.
Mugabe’s characterisation of him as an ignoramus is ridiculous.
Stephen Chan, professor of international relations at the University of London and dean of law and social sciences at the School of Oriental and African studies, who in 2005 published a series of interviews with Tsvangirai, says he has “an instinctive intellectual sense”.
Biti describes him as quick on his feet. Everybody I have asked to characterise Tsvangirai has said that he is a good listener.
Some say that this listening is inclusive, considered and useful. For some this deference to the collective and to consensus is a weakness. But when he leads a party that is so directly the opposite of Mugabe’s tyrannical rule, an alternative style of politics will be necessary, says Raftopoulos.
A criticism: Tsvangirai is impressionable. He takes as gospel what the last person he has spoken to has said. Biti suggests that “… perhaps he listens too well. He will have to restrict entry at his door when he assumes office.”
Chan, the author of several books on Africa, including Grasping Africa: A Tale of Tragedy and Achievement (2007), proposes that Tsvangirai ” … give more time to framing his responses and to reflection after having talked to a wide number of people”.
Whether he is cut out for the hot seat is not yet clear, but Biti says he is confident that Tsvangirai “…has this quiet acknowledgment of the fact that he has a duty and a responsibility and that history has chosen him”.
Bizos, and many others I have spoken to say that Tsvangirai is “a good man”. In Africa and elsewhere, such a man is notoriously hard to find. And he is humble, by all accounts.
Chan says that while Tsvangirai, like most of the Southern African Development Community leaders, likes a bit of bling, at home he tends his garden in shirt sleeves. He enjoys a quiet night in. He is attached to his wife and his six children. Hopefully, he is never going to become a “Big Man”. He’s learned the hard way that Africa has had one too many of those.
But it is early to judge him as a ruler, Raftopolous says. “We must give him the benefit of the doubt.”