The MDC is over. Ran three times. Their leader lost every time. They took power last time, became the ruling party, and managed to do nothing for democracy (plenty for themselves as individuals). They took the major cities every time – and again failed to make a serious democratic change every time.

And they deserved to lose. Not that the real loss is by as much as the reported margin. But they failed to campaign. Throughout their time as Ruling Party. Shocking loss of focus on the big picture. They deserved to lose.

They lost when they became a political party. Changed form being a ‘movement’ for democratic change, to the political party ‘Movement for Democratic Change’. A movement is a broad based, social, economic, cultural opinion. A voice, capable of saying all things, including all points of view, embracing all methods, being all things to all people. A Movement. A movement can be anti. E.g. the anti-apartheid movement. The anti-poaching movement. The anti gender violence movement. A political party is an organisation whose aim is to take and retain power. It does need discipline. And it needs an objective. What to do with the power it takes. The MDC had none of that. No discipline. No objective (and ‘anti’ is not an objective, it must be ‘for’). And it lost it’s broad base of support – although it did have massive support.

However, the struggle for democracy has thrown up many organisations. And they have all moved further along the road to democracy than the organisation that came before it. The Forum, and ZUM, both got further towards democracy (real democracy) than those previously. There is a wave effect. Started small, and each succeeding opposition movement goes further towards unseating the one party state than the one before it.

So maybe the next one…

This entry was posted on September 13th, 2013 at 12:48 pm by Michael Laban and is filed under Elections 2013, Uncategorized, Zimbabwe Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.