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A reality check is what the opposition MDC-Alliance needs right now.
The party and its supporters have been pushing and posturing hard for a so-called Government of National Unity or a transitional authority after losing elections that were held on July 30 this year.

In these elections, President Mnangagwa and the ruling Zanu-PF defeated Mr Nelson Chamisa and his party in the Presidential and parliamentary polls, with the revolutionary party attaining over two-thirds majority.

However, Mr Chamisa and his party somehow believed that they could get via the backdoor of negotiations what they failed to garner on July 30.

In this scheme, the elections became a worthless academic exercise whose process and outcome would not matter: the voice of the people — the plebians that underlined the process —would be irrelevant.

So, too, would the millions of taxpayers’ money poured into the exercise.

Power would be negotiated and elite pacts made in boardrooms outside the provenance of the masses.

The prospects went deeper, and more absurd.

A “transitional authority” would rule the country in preparation for another election, as though the very idea of the consociational politics was not a rejection of the democratic process of elections.

Mr Chamisa and his ilk went to extraordinary lengths to make a case for this GNU on the assumption that the ruling party would be moved, cowed by histrionics such as demonstrations and rallies, the supposed show of force.

However, Zanu-PF has just stamped its foot down and declared that it is not interested in the politics of another GNU because it enjoys the legitimacy deriving from July 30.

Yesterday, as President Mnangagwa opened the 17th Annual National People’s Conference in Esigodini, he made this clear.

As we report elsewhere in this issue, the President said Zanu-PF was given a fresh mandate of five years by the electorate and will govern this country for the next half decade. Full stop.

It is a call that he also made at the party’s Central Committee meeting earlier in the week.

One cannot miss the finality in this declaration.

Vice President and Second Secretary of Zanu-PF Cde Constantino Chiwenga, in his own remarks, emphasised that the party was not in a compromising mood.

Not that it had been opposed to talks in principle. No. As a matter of fact, as Cde Chiwenga noted, after winning July 30, President Mnangagwa had been magnanimous enough to extend a hand to the opposition but the latter spurned it.

That hand, as Cde Chiwenga puts it, has since been withdrawn.

Zanu-PF is no longer interested in talking to the opposition, least of all regarding a GNU, in whatever guise.

President Mnangagwa yesterday told the nation that Zanu-PF would now concentrate on national development: rebuild the economy, create wealth, fight corruption and bring prosperity to the people.

That changes the narrative completely.

With the New Year beckoning, Zanu-PF will be on a completely different trajectory.

The MDC-Alliance needs to wake up from its GNU daydream and be alive to this fact.