Morgan Tsvangirai, the late icon of Zimbabwe’s tenuous democratic struggle, is a man I knew so well, having served as his spokesperson and trusted lieutenant for almost a decade until his untimely death in February 2018.
This is the man whose legacy of a broad front as represented by the MDC Alliance is enduring savage attacks from the regime and its hired mercenaries.indeed, the MDC Alliance is Tsvangirai’s rich legacy that Zanu PF and its surrogates are desperately trying to decimate in a systematic way. Thank God, the big idea remains standing, despite the vicious body blows. Since the biblical days of Judas Iscariot, we have always known what 30 pieces of silver can do to cheap and treacherous minds.
I knew Morgan so well since the days of my other life as a journalist. And for 10 years I was not just his spokesperson, for it was him who personally directed that I double as the party’s Director of Communications as well, a position that had always traditionally been a separate office held by a different individual. Even when he appointed me as his spokesperson when he served as Prime Minister of the land, he made me hold the position of Principal Director of Communications as well, a position that had previously been separate from that of the spokesperson. This meant that upon my appointment, he entrusted me with the conflated and conjoined roles of Principal Director of Communications and spokesperson to the Prime Minister.
Such was his faith in my aptitude.
Morgan Tsvangirai, the icon, had the humility to arrive, unannounced, at my rural home at Tamborenyoka village in Shumba ward 3 in Domboshava to pay his last respects upon the death of my late paternal grandmother, Martha Tamborenyoka Gombera, when she succumbed to gastric cancer in May 2014.
We travelled the world together with Morgan: London, Canberra, Lisbon, Rabat, Amsterdam, Washington, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, Pretoria, Blantyre, Lusaka, Cairo, Maputo, Windhoek, Luanda and many other World capitals on political business. I was with him in these capitals when he patriotically represented his country and charmed the world as he passionately spoke about the democratic cause in Zimbabwe. In the almost 10 years that I served him, we also traversed the whole country together; from Chirundu to Limpopo, from Msampakaruma to Mandidzudzure and from Mt Darwin to Victoria Falls.
Apart from the conjoined and dual roles that he often gave me, he would also entrust me even with commenting on personal issues such as his amorous scandals that would ordinarily be handled by a family spokesperson, as he did in 2012 when he was deemed to have married one Lorcadia Karimatsenga Tembo. After intense confidential briefings on the intimate details of what had transpired and his personal view on the specific matter, he directed his family members to defer all press questions to me.
The trust he often bestowed on me was humbling. And may be that is why he expressed utmost shock early in February 2018 when he heard, while detained in an infirmary in South Africa, that some members of his family led by by a coterie of the usual suspects in the party had unprocedurally directed that I cease my role as his spokesperson.
” Nhai Luke, when you became my spokesperson, where you employed by my family?” he asked in a low voice over the phone from his hospital bed in South Africa, assuring me that his family, which I have always respected, had never been my employer and that I should remain unperturbed and continue doing my job as usual. He intimated to me that apart from his wife and other family members, he had instructed hospital staff to keep me in the loop should anything happen to him. And that is why at 1733 hrs, the hospital authorities apprised me of his death when he succumbed to cancer on 14 February 2020 .
Such was my special relationship to this man; the man who paid almost US$60 000 of his own money to meet my medical bill when I was involved in a near-fatal car accident in the early hours of Sunday, 4 November 2012.
He even cut short his honeymoon to flew back home and visited me in hospital to check how I was faring following my near-demise.
Such was my special relationship to this man. This context of our mutual trust and Tsvangirai’s ceaseless faith in my aptitude is important for this treatise. I presume that this context gives me sufficient locus standi _to state unequivocally that this Morgan Tsvangirai that I knew so well is turning and twisting in his grave at how his legacy is being severely eroded and undermined by this motley cabal of Khupe, Mwonzora, Komichi and Mudzuri under the pretence that they are protecting it.
The MDC Alliance is an integral part of Tsvangirai’ rich legacy and I had a ringside seat when the history around its formation was unfolding. For one and a half months, beginning February 2017, we traversed the whole country together as he engaged and consulted a diverse spectrum of Zimbabweans within and without the party. Tsvangirai believed in mass-line politics and that explained his enduring traction and political capital. He was never one to make a decision without consulting the people and during that national tour, we spoke to party members, traditional leaders, students, civil servants and ordinary Zimbabweans outside the party.
Throughout the country during our one-and-a-half months of consultation away from home, the people clearly told us that the only prudent way forward was for Tsvangirai himself to lead a broad front in his fight against Zanu PF. It was during that tour, while in Binga, that I learnt that kujatana_ is the Tonga word for unity or working together. After the intensive consultations, the two of us sat together for a whole evening in March 2017 writing a public message to the people of Zimbabwe that was aptly titled I Heard *You . The statement was his assurance to Zimbabweans that he had heard them. The need for unity had rung out loud throughout the nationwide tour and that was how the unity under the MDC Alliance banner was borne. The rest, as they say, is history.
This simply means therefore that one cannot fight and undermine the MDC Alliance, as the surrogates are doing, and still claim to be defending Tsvangirai’s legacy. The MDC Alliance against which the cabal is engaged in mortal combat, is a unique testament of Tsvangirai’s rich legacy. It represents the broad front that Zimbabweans clamoured for during intensive nationwide consultations.
The Tsvangirai I know is twisting and turning in his grave that these surrogates are fighting the people’s great idea and in the process undermining his legacy. And it’s not helping matters that these surrogates are fronting a formation that bears his initial (MDC-T) and are headquartered in a building that we befittingly named after him! This means they they are unwittingly making his great name an accomplice to their treachery and quisling politics.
Worse still, they are consorting and comporting with Zanu PF, the party that the great Tsvangirai tenaciously fought until his death. The same party that arrested and brutalised him his entire adult life.
Tsvangirai was a man who spent a huge chunk of his adult life fighting Zanu PF repression, corruption and unbridled culture of avarice and entitlement. He fought so hard all his life to establish democracy in the country of his birth. He defeated Robert Mugabe in the 2008 election but had his victory violently stolen from him. He was charged with treason in 2004 and was was almost killed through the savage attacks inside Machipisa police station. And we have every reason to believe that Zanu PF had a hand in the cancer attack that killed him. .
But thanks to the treacherous politics of Khupe, Mwonzora and others, the same Zanu PF has now established a second headquarters in a building called Morgan Richard Tsvangirai House!
The surrogates have never uttered a word against Mnangagwa and Zanu PF. Their business is always Nelson Chamisa, the MDC Alliance and its deployees to Parliament and the various local authorities. They are an opposition whose business is to fight another opposition party. Indeed, an opposition created to decimate and annihilate a Tsvangirai legacy called the MDC Alliance.
