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Tendai Biti

Tichaona Zindoga  Political Editor

It should be hard being in People’s Democratic Party leader Tendai Biti’s shoes right now. Over the past couple of days he has been abandoned by at least 11 officials who have gone to Zimbabwe People First and MDC-T.These include Biti’s vice president Samuel Sipepa Nkomo and eight others who defected to ZimPF while Tongai Matutu and Paul Madzore rejoined MDC-T, sparking celebrations redolent of the return of the biblical prodigal son..

To highlight Biti’s plight, one daily had a cartoon of Biti being stabbed in the back and crying, “Et tu Brute?” redolent of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as the King decried being betrayed by his closest lieutenants, including Brutus.

Biti himself has put a brave face, but judging from the statement he issued, deep inside he is a man in agony.

Psychologists contend that in such unpleasant circumstances people push uncomfortable reality down the surface like an iceberg. So Biti wrote a rather brave dirge reflecting on the latest twist to his political career.

“In recent days the PDP has lost from its ranks dedicated cadres that include our Vice President Dr Nkomo Samuel Sipepa ,our Deputy National Chair Watchy Sibanda and Tongai Matutu our Deputy Secretary General,” he said.

“The truth of the matter is that as PDP we are disappointed to have lost such courageous and esteemed comrades from our ranks. We thank them for the years of courage and joy we shared. Indeed for the years of pain and toil we endured in our quest to establish another Zimbabwe. One based on legitimacy, inclusivity, equality and respect of the rule of law. One where the citizen is the owner of the processes and products of her effort.

“One where there is diversity and celebration of our differences. One where there is a united common vision, to put the common good first and to value the dignity of hard honest work.

“It is in this spirit that we wish our colleagues well, wherever they have gone and whatever circumstances they may have left,” he said.

One cannot help the feelings of loss and desolateness in this but, by way of sanitising or rationalising this loss, Biti says no political party owns an individual who retains both freedom of association and “dissociation”.

“Often times in Africa our people are trapped and enslaved in dysfunctional broken down associations where the right of choice is nominal and captured,” says he.

The rest of the dirge features this masked mourning as poor Biti tries to come to terms with his grief.

He even consoles himself that he still has notable individuals on his side.

Yet nobody can be sure how long they will last on his side.

But just how much can we measure Biti’s grief?

First, this should be seen as the latest of Biti’s many political flirtations which have come and gone since the early 1990s when he dallied with such outfits, individuals and ideas as Edgar Tekere’s Zimbabwe Unity Movement and Margaret Dongo and her Zimbabwe Union of Democrats.

At the turn of the millennium he became the founding secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai and stayed with him when the party faced a huge split in 2005.

He broke with Tsvangirai in 2014 following the loss of the 2013 and he called for “leadership renewal” in the party.

Along with the likes of Elton Mangoma, they formed what was known as the “Renewal Team” but no sooner had they rebelled against Tsvangirai than they parted ways too.

This time, Mangoma formed his Renewal Democrats of Zimbabwe and Biti became the undisputed leader of PDP.

But the big burning shame is that in losing Sipepa and others Biti has also lost an alliance with Joice Mujuru who “poached” the nine.

Biti had wanted the alliance with Mujuru for the strategic, historical-legitimacy reason of tapping into liberation war credentials of the former vice president.

Those who remember him speaking at Sapes in March 2014, will recall him calling for the “democratic movement” to embrace, finally, “progressive liberation forces.”

“. . . I am proposing we must find accommodation within the liberation struggle. We can’t put a durawall (precast wall) with the liberation struggle. The liberation struggle is not our enemy. It liberated some of us. Some of us could be uneducated fools herding cattle in Murehwa,” he said then.

What he was holding onto, it appears, is gone.

What next for Tendai Biti?