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MDC-Alliance has called for a demonstration this Thursday ostensibly to protest the prevailing economic hardships. A noble initiative indeed, only if it was well meant.

As we report elsewhere in this issue, the demonstration is an attempt by the official but declining opposition party to get through the back door what it failed to get on July 30,  a seat in Government.

MDC-A leader Mr Nelson Chamisa told the British paper, The Guardian, that the protests would call for a “transitional authority” to “move the country forward”.

It is also evident to anyone with any of the brains God promised the grasshopper that the protests are also meant to serenade the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the August 1 disturbances.

The record will show that the MDC-A sent protesters into the streets on August 1, and an orgy of violence ensued during which six of the rioters lost their lives and property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was looted, destroyed or torched.

What better way to try to deny culpability than calling for another round of protests markedly different from August 1?

We all heard Chamisa, in a rare moment of lucidity, characterise the August 1 forays as stupid.

While it is the MDCA’s democratic right to be “stupid” as it were, we hope the party’s supporters will have the good sense to realise that Chamisa and his cohorts want to use them for selfish ends.

The MDCA sent protesters into the streets last August with disastrous consequences, we hope this time around the protests will be peaceful and leave people to go about their business.

If the MDCA leaders really cared about people’s livelihoods,  they would have gracefully accepted defeat and embraced President Mnangagwa’s bid to recognise the office of leader of the opposition.

By now the MDCA would have done justice to the role of the official opposition by shadowing the incumbent Government to  hold it accountable to the electorate.

As it is, through their penchant for infantile disruption of Parliament, walkouts and so on, the MDCA is shirking the duty of the official opposition. The party is also short-changing the supporters who sent  it to Parliament in the belief that its leaders know why they were sent to Parliament.

By refusing to concede and raising baseless allegations of alleged rigging, the MDCA gave hawks in the Trump administration the excuse to maintain their ruinous economic sanctions regime.

In fact if the MDCA was really concerned about the lot of the people, they would not have attacked Mr Strive Masiyiwa when he called for the lifting of the illegal economic sanctions regime.

The MDCA would have echoed Mr Masiyiwa’s sentiments and as part of their protests on Thursday, MDCA leaders would have a stopover at the US Embassy to hand over a petition calling for the lifting of the ruinous sanctions regime to the Ambassador.

The fact that the MDCA, to this day, claims there are no sanctions on Zimbabwe is the reason why progressive Zimbabweans should not answer the party’s call for protests.

We hope MDCA supporters will not vindicate Mr Chamisa’s characterisation that they are candidates for the science of  stupid!