As we approach the home run in the final stretch of the 2013 harmonized elections the talk of a grand coalition among political parties will just lead us to another blame game in the face of defeat. Looking back at how the two MDC parties have worked together in the inclusive government will tell you the that the relation wasn’t rosy at all so efforts to forge an alliance at this ninth hour are just futile. The only time these two parties teamed up was during the election of Speaker of Parliament and after the relationship went sour especially when then Ncube faction was embroiled in its own succession battle with the then leader Arthur Mutambara. Legislators from MDC-N were expelled from the party faction when they crossed floor to join Mr Tsvangirai’s faction. We later heard reports of the leaders of the unity government teaming up together and having closed door meetings singling out Welshman. In Maputo a grandstanding was staged at an SADC meeting when Tsvangirai and Ncube tried to humiliate President Robert Mugabe.

Just when people thought that the relationship had normalized the two leaders started their election campaigns by trading insults at each other, with Tsvangirai boasting of a huge support calling Ncube a village politician bent on peddling tribal politics. This tirade has turned out to be like a “dissing” contest at a rap concert. The lack of tangible policies in this year’s campaign is a clear sign of how politicians are trying to fill gaps in election manifestos with insults. If we are going to elect a leader should we base that on how eloquently the candidate disrespects opponents like a recent campaign advert I heard on radio about Tsvangirai’s sex life which is being peddled by ZANU-PF.

This entry was posted on July 26th, 2013 at 11:52 am by Lenard Kamwendo and is filed under Elections 2013, Governance, Zimbabwe Blog, Zimbabwe News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.