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This is the third and final part of a presentation by MDC-T secretary-general Tendai Biti to a SAPES Trust Policy Dialogue on March 6, 2014, in which he dissected the problems facing his party, MDC-T, and other opposition parties that he said had failed to grow from protest movements to viable alternatives to Zanu-PF. A problem he said was manifest in other African countries where post-liberation movements that had managed to depose liberation movements were being ditched by the people in favour of resurgent liberation movements.

THE next thing is the issue of violence. We cannot arbitrate our differences through violence. I find it totally unacceptable. I would rather sit at home than belong to any organisation that believes that violence can be an instrument for political arbitration. You know we have got families. Some of us takafa kudhara.

We have been in this game. You wouldn’t do what some of us do if you were not slightly insane to face a dictatorship? We take risks. So you know your risk that if I go fine. I was arrested in 2008 during the time of those murders in June. And one prayer that I kept on saying to myself is ‘that God let them do it quickly. Let them not cut my lips like what they did to Ndira and others.

‘God can someone out there look after my family’.
And one of the things, when the policemen were beating me up, was that ‘why are you not crying?’, ‘Why are you not pleading for help?’ ‘Wakatsika payi?’ That is the way they used. Actually because they arrested me from South Africa they thought that I had wires from America or somewhere. They made me strip naked and searched me.

But I can live with it because my mind is psychologically trained to that suffering. I voluntarily chose to be what I am. But not Thabo Biti my eight-year-old son, not Zoe Biti, my 12-year-old daughter. So if violence is going to happen, it’s not acceptable but if you have to take it to families I think its exceptionally abominable.  So I think if the opposition movement, the democratic movement has to find a way, it has to find a way of articulating, of discoursing, dialoguing without the use of violence.

It’s not worth it. Because if we can do this when we are in the trenches what more when some of us can control state power? Some of us would have to go to Siberia and change our name to (inaudible) . . . I do not know about the black skin, maybe we would have to breach, pass through Nigeria and buy bleaching chemicals. It’s not acceptable at all.
It’s a no go area. It’s a no go area, the issue of violence.

So I think that this is a time, in conclusion, this a time that we need a strong opposition movement. But it can’t be the vertical opposition organisation that we had in 2013. It has to be horizontal. It has to be a home for everyone. We have to build a UDF, a United Democratic Front.
We have to build a United Democratic Front that is ready for an explosion that can take place in this country.
That is also ready to talk to the many progressing forces that I know are in the liberation movement.

And also this UDF I am proposing must find accommodation within the liberation struggle. We can’t put a durawall 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 Murewa. So our message should be that we are completing the unfinished business of the liberation struggle. Therefore we have got an umbilical code with the liberation struggle because I know that somewhere along the line we created contradiction and chasm with the liberation struggle.

But creating a chasm with the liberation struggle, making peace with the liberation struggle is not necessarily making peace with the liberation movement. The two are different, the two are different.

So we need a strong opposition. And one of the things that really really worries me as a Zimbabwean is that we are at a crossroad in that if you have the crisis of leadership that I have spoken of at the beginning. This crisis of leadership it creates a vacuum. And given that we are struggling with things like age and so forth. That vacuum can be filled by undemocratic forces.

So if ever there was a time that Zimbabwe needed a strong, vibrant, united opposition, it is now. So the comrades in civic society, the comrades in the political parties, it is time to talk. Put our house in order. But let’s return to values. Let’s craft a coherent message, let’s   de-personalise the struggle and let’s create an alternative narrative. I thank you.