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Fungi Kwaramba

Political Editor

Growing up in the country’s ghettos, playing plastic balls was commonplace. 

Young boys stripped to their shorts, sometimes with holes that revealed their nether parts, and ran in the scorching sun playing their hearts and lungs out in an imagined stadium.

In that imagined set-up, the goalposts were often made of heaped stones no higher than knee level and of course, there was no crossbar, a missing vital link that often led to fistfights and ended matches prematurely with no winners.

With not so many rules to talk about, a goal that would necessarily be allowed would be disqualified on the grounds it was too high in the air, and indeed high was the ghetto lingo for your typical volleys.

In most circumstances it was the goalie, never mind his height, who determined whether it was a goal or not, for rarely were linesmen or referees as young boys chased plastic balls to escape mundane household chores.

It was all in our imagination and in an imagined set-up anything can stand for rules are the essence of sports, and indeed life as a whole, so much that even in the jungle there are ritualistic standards of living that animals follow.

However, without those rules, and playing football as young boys did and still do in the empty spaces in their ghettos, be it Mpopoma in Bulawayo, Chinotimba in Victoria Falls or Mucheke in Masvingo, anarchy which is inherently unstable is the unpalatable alternative.

Enter Wapusa Wapusa

With no structures, no constitution, and no rules and guidelines as to its operations, the country’s main opposition CCC fares no better than the boys who swelter shirtless chasing plastic balls in an imagined stadium where anyone can make the rules.

Because the party is functioning like an informal organisation, anyone can lay claim to the title with little room for conflict resolution because there are no set standards and room for adjudication.

It is trite that organisations that operate like Wapusa Wapusa, an infamous cult that was a staff of legends in the 1980s and early 1990s which was conducted in the dead of the night, with candles that were snuffed out during the supposed church service, opening floodgates for randy men to chase whichever skirts they could lustfully lay their hands on.

“You won’t see where its head is, you won’t see where its legs are. You want some people to occupy certain party positions, No, in our party there are no positions, its “Wapusa wapusa”, we know each other in that darkness. That’s how we are working. We know each other, we know who is where . . . So be steady, you Zanu PF people, you will not do to this party, what you did to that other party. 

“You want us to split, but we will not split; not least because no one has a position or membership. If you say you’re a member, we will ask you to give us your card, and to tell us who gave it to you and where you bought it from,” Mr Chamisa, who fancies himself as a pastor, was recorded telling his supporters.

Thus by his own admission, communication in his party is based on strategic ambiguity, meaning that there are no set channels for communication as his party, which operates in darkness, Wapuwa wapusa style, gropes in the darkness.

And just like the Wapusa Wapusa cult, from which it seemingly derives its strategies, it is free for all where the likes of Shengezo Tshabangu, who we know now as the interim secretary-general, can recall legislators with binding consequences.

There is no one at the gate

As things stand, there is no one who can lay claim to the opposition movement, which is again teetering on the brink of destruction amid indications that there is a resolve to defy Mr Chamisa’s directive to pull out of Parliament and local authorities, the victims of his knee jerk reaction cry rivers over his failure to form structures that would have given form and substance to his amorphous organisation. 

Indeed, how does Chamisa, with no constitution, no structures, and no defined hierarchy, get the mandate to recall or order legislators from Parliament, apart from grabbing headlines that will melt with the rising of the next day?

He created a vacuum, and power hates such a space so much that whoever moves first can call the ultimate shots, this time seemingly with dire consequences on CCC.

Except, he will not succeed for there are already signs that his discarded former vice presidents are moving in for the jugular, for a kill that will of course be of immense benefit to Zanu PF, which I dare say has no dog in this fight, but stands to benefit from the ensuing                                 chaos.

Actually, the story is told of how one Professor Welshman Ncube travelled to the Nomination Court in July this year to submit his papers as the first senatorial candidate, only to find out that his name had been deleted from the final list that Chamisa had, at the 11th hour, altered to add his preferred candidates, with scant regard to the feelings of the learned professor who has since then been sulking, irate at the way he was disrespected by a boy he taught the ropes in politics.

It was not only Prof Ncube who was thrown to the political dustbin, but also the equally vociferous Tendai Biti, who saw the primary election being rigged to shut him out and forever condemn him to memory dustbins.

He, by his admission, prefers to be left in private after that monumental snub.

Isn’t it obvious that Mr Biti and Professor Ncube and a long list of discarded former CCC stalwarts are behind the current hari-kari in the CCC, a familiar tale of the self-disembowelling that has been typical of the opposition since its formation by former white farmers at the turn of the millennium?

Although the two, who have been told to form their parties if they dare Chamisa, have not been as confrontational and determined to jettison their “leader”, they have both been encoding chillingly cryptic messages that no doubt speak to their grievances with the state of affairs in the party that some say is run like a tuck-shop.

In particular, in the Matabeleland region where Tshabangu recalled most of the MPs and councillors, there are festering wounds over Chamisa’s imposition of candidates, including forcing councillors to vote for ex-Rhodie David Coltart as the Mayor of Bulawayo.

In hushed tones, Chamisa has been accused by his own of suffering from narcissistic disorder fuelled by messianic disorder and thus blinded by the stark reality that reveals itself in electoral drubbing and the donkey-like stubbornness to form structures.

Chamisa brooks no opposition and regards those who hold divergent views as unfit to be worthy of his company, and that has brewed tensions for some time now leading to his attempt on September 11 to direct the Speaker of Parliament, not to accept any other communication other than his, but he was a tad too late, for in Wapusa wapusa, anyone can do his heart’s desires.

Maybe, he did not mean Chamisa, but Prof Ncube wrote on September 8 cryptically that: “Narcissistic personality disorder is a mental health disorder of extreme self-centredness & forever seeking attention & administration. Leaders with this disorder are capricious, selfish & have no empathy except as an instrument of attention-seeking”.

Needless to say, his blog received the usual brickbats from Chamisa’s supporters who felt the professor was on a riddle’s lecture.

And while Prof Ncube has been dropping measured bombshells, the voluble Biti was not so charitable, telling a colleague that Tshabangu jumped the gun as Chamisa was going to personally bury his political life.

“I am not the President of any political party. I refuse to be drawn into this mess. May my privacy and dignity be respected,” Biti wrote but before that, he had assured one of his supporters that “it was premature munhu anga achapera ega uyu”.

Maybe indeed “munhu akutopera” forever, because CCC lacks a well-defined structure and is run unilaterally by a single all-powerful individual, and when you lack internal democracy, how can you get cohesion and coherence?

It is a free-for-all.