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Morgan Tsvangirai

My Turn with Tichaona Zindoga
Of course, we all know that State of the Nation addresses are made by government/State leaders once or twice in a year to take stock of current issues and the direction a country is taking and what the authorities need to do, or are doing.

And such SONAs — Americans call them “state of the Union” — usually generate a lot of talking points before and after their presentations.

They are more like a tradition but spectacles all the same.

Just look back on South African President Jacob Zuma’s SONA in February which was widely anticipated and gave us all the spectacle of the opposition EFF MPs being forcibly ejected from the chamber.

That, rather than what President Zuma said, was to be the talking point of the address.

In fact, the ejected MPs’ leader, one Julius Malema, dismissed the contents of the actual address thus: “What you said here in our absence, and when the police were assaulting women, breaking their jaws and fracturing their chins, pulling us by our private parts, is not consistent with what the Freedom Charter says, and we are here back in these chambers to expose you to that reality.”

The SONA and its attendant ruckus will no doubt mark one of the biggest talking points of the year. But that is to digress a bit.

In Zimbabwe, an opposition politician called Morgan Tsvangirai has for the past two years come up with his own imagined state of the nation address.

He is no state leader, but perhaps as the country’s top opposition leader, what he says in this contrivance — an imagination of him as the shadow president of the country — may have said something useful.

But he didn’t or couldn’t. And this past weekend he was at it again. Not many people would know because it was devoid of drama and talking points and, in essence, meaning.

It was a state of nothing address, so to speak!

Now, what do you expect from a man who dwells on a near-win he scored seven years ago and somehow believes it is a basis of ruling the country when in fact there were elections in the intervening period that he emphatically lost in 2013?

The reader may recall that this was a subject of this column last week wherein we told Tsvangirai that 2008 was way past and he needed to concentrate in the next, in 2018, counsel which Tsvangirai ignored.

Or does he have the wisdom to?

He performed worse.

He chose June 27 as the day for his address.

He said nostalgically: “Exactly seven years ago to the day and three months after I had defeated him in an election, President Mugabe contested against himself in a bloody election run-off and claimed he had won. . . We also meet today, two years after the people’s vote was subverted in yet another stolen election on 31 July 2013. . . They told us then that it was an overwhelming victory for Zanu PF; but we can now all testify that the true victor in that election was evil and the hopelessness of the people that we see around us today.”

The reader may also recall what Mark Twain taught us about nostalgia. Tsvangirai seems to forget nothing and thus learns nothing.

He is a good candidate to lose again in the elections of 2018.

Amid the drivel that makes the typical Tsvangirai speech, one quickly flips, or if on your computer, scrolls to the section that says “way forward”.

You get a sense of having been on that empty road before.

Of course you have.

What with this kind of a gem: “I want to say that we in the MDC believe that there is no sanctions regime and our national predicament has nothing to do with the so-called sanctions that have become a convenient cover-up for Zanu PF failure and incompetence. They have become masters in continually denying that the problems we face today were mainly created by them and them alone.”

This coming from the same mouth that asked for the embargo and even urged neighbours South Africa to cut fuel and electricity supplies.

He tells us that “international engagement. . . and intervention must be conditional on Zimbabwe respecting values such as democracy and respect of the rights of the citizen which must mean the demand and insistence by the international community for the implementation of far-reaching reforms.”

Reforms! Reforms! Reforms!

You know there can never be an end to the call for this Holy Grail until Tsvangirai finds himself in power: in short, everything must be reformed, nay changed, until it makes it possible for Tsvangirai to be the president of the Republic.

That is, we must also do away with election contests, which Tsvangirai always loses.

But hold on, Tsvangirai has a bright idea!

“I as Morgan Tsvangirai, and the party I lead are prepared to work with Zimbabweans of all shades and political colours to bring back the country to sanity,” he tells us.

“I see the true grand coalition not as the unity of individuals or leaders of political parties, but as a unity of Zimbabweans who possess shared values and convergence on the patriotic goal to take our country forward.

“Today, I promise Zimbabweans that we are on the brink of an exciting political moment and they will be see (sic) us as political leaders converging on those issues that matter most to us all Zimbabweans.”

The grand coalition is none other than the rejects from Zanu-PF, some of whom are so nervous and cowardly that they will not dare lift a finger in any contest against their former party or own up to their past misdeeds.

It is only Morgan who can think that a coalition with these failed and often flailing individuals can bring a different complexion to the national body politic.

He is such a genius!