ZwNews Chief Correspondent
Over the years, Zimbabwe’s opposition parties have been gifting the ruling party through vote splitting; the opposition has failed to work together against a common enemy, thereby losing ground and donating votes to ZANU PF due to vote sharing.
As it was said; that history has the tendency of repeating itself, President Emmerson Mnangagwa could be smiling all the way to the bank after cracks have developed in the alliance camp, with some principals vowing that they would not bow down to Nelson Chamisa, whose party is dominating the shared seats.
When the MDC Alliance came into being, many thought that now, the opposition parties had struck the right codes, however, the discord that is slowly brewing has the potential to benefit the ruling ZANU PF party once again.
A storm is brewing as evidenced by the statement by the MDC-T spokesperson Morgan Komichi who recently said most of the candidates donated from the alliance partners are not as popular as the ones from his MDC-T, and that as such, there isn’t much time to market them to the electorate, but to replace them.
This did not go down well with some key partners in the alliance, who claim that this cannot be taken as water under the bridge.
The alliance spokesperson and one of the key partners in the grouping, Welshman Ncube, blasted Komichi quizzing the criteria used to measure the weaknesses of the partners’ candidates.
He said MDC-T was now acting in bad faith by removing candidates fielded by alliance partners.
Though Komichi’s argument may hold water, some think that is the consequence of poor planning on the part of the principals, as this could have been sorted out in the beginning of talks, since they knew that time was not on their side.
When the grand coalition of opposition parties was first mooted, the then President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe laughed it off, saying the marriage was nothing to go by. Mugabe who has at some point benefited from vote splitting when MDC broke into 3 parts predicted that sooner or later the united opposition parties would falter because of power greediness.
