MORGAN, an UNSUITABLE CASE for TREATMENT

Is there a more wan figure on the world’s political stage than that of Morgan Tsvangirai? He has known Robert Mugabe for more than thirty years, having begun his political rise in Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party when he was immediately marked for preferment. Now, I have never met Mr Mugabe and I only know of his career through the highly partial medium of the British media. But this much I know: that Mugabe is the wiliest African leader since Jomo Kenyatta and the least scrupulous since Idi Amin. If I know that, Tsvangirai must know it too.

Morgan no free man

How come, then, that he has allowed himself to be so comprehensively outmanoeuvred in the Zimbabwean elections held at the end of last month? Did he not guess that Mugabe would stop at nothing to defeat him in the presidential ballot that has overwhelmingly extended the old fox’s rule for another five years to add to the 33 years he has already enjoyed? Mugabe is 89 years old.

In the presidential ballot, Mugabe defeated Tsvangirai by nearly two-to-one. In the House of Assembly, ZANU-PF won three times as many seats as Tsvangirai’s MDC grouping and hence has a sufficient majority to introduce whatever constitutional changes that Mugabe fancies. For the MDC, the election was an utter disaster.

Mugabe: giving nothing away – absolutely nothing

Whistling in the dark, Tsvangirai now says that “the fraudulent and stolen election has plunged Zimbabwe into a constitutional, political and economic crisis. Instead of celebration, there is national mourning”. In fact, there is remarkably little evidence of either crisis or mourning. Zimbabweans know that Mugabe stole the election but they also know that there is precious little that they can do about it. The wider world deplores the myriad scandals and manipulations that accompanied the vote but Obama and Putin, Cameron and Merkel have much more pressing problems to face.

Tsvangirai says that the MDC will “boycott government institutions” and challenge the election result through the courts. Good luck with that. The unspecified government institutions will not notice (save that, without an MDC presence, it will be that much simpler to carry out Mugabe’s wishes) and the courts will doubtless find the evidence of ballot theft inconclusive – after all, the judges are all Mugabe appointees. So unless something very unexpected happens, the outside world will hear no more of Morgan Tsvangirai and probably very little of Zimbabwe until such time as Robert Mugabe passes peacefully in office and we discover whether he has arranged anything effective about the succession.

A stylish poster campaign

The absurdity of it all is that, for the past five years, Tsvangirai has been Zimbabwe’s prime minster, in office and in power in a coalition with ZANU-PF under Mugabe’s presidency. Was he asleep at the wheel? Did he not anticipate that Mugabe would strain every sinew to ensure that the coalition would be ended at the 2013 election? Could he not have taken pre-emptive action to guard the sanctity of the election? Suddenly to bleat after the event that it’s turned out to be unfair seems, at the very least, ineffectual.

Democracy Zimbabwe style: but what's in those boxes?

Mugabe allowed observers of the ballot only from friendly neighbouring nations and, hearing their complacent views of the conduct of the election, you realise that they would not have been much of a challenge to buy off. Tsvangirai should have insisted that a large UN team be allowed to monitor the election. Indeed, it ought to be a condition of continued membership of the UN that all member nations allow UN observers to attend national elections. There is no country – not even Britain or the United States – where some sharp electoral practice cannot be detected.

What is an open secret in Harare is that Tsvangirai has spent considerably more of his time as prime minister in chasing women than in shoring up his power base and planning to try to outflank his ruthless opponent. His first wife Susan was killed in a head-on car crash that Tsvangirai was the only Zimbabwean outside ZANU-PF not to blame on Mugabe’s intelligence officers. Perhaps he was glad to be rid of her. He very quickly ceased to behave like a mourning widower and he remarried last autumn, though his philandering has evidently not been scaled down since.

Getting spliced for a second time

The tragedy is that the coalition of MDC and ZANU-PF achieved a fair amount in repairing the damage caused by Mugabe’s heedless conduct of the national economy while unrestrained by coalition. Tsvangirai, having ensured a fair ballot, could have fought on his economic record. He might even have won. Instead, he survives only as an ineffectual footnote to one of the longest and most destructive reigns in modern African history.