It seemed that a split in the MDC had been averted but no, Zimbabwe is in the grip of a new crisis. Brian Raftopoulos has done his best to help the two factions find a compromise, a facesaver, anything that will restore the country's hopes for a return to sanity, but if he cannot broker a peace, I doubt if anybody can.
Protest marches were promised when I started this blog so I kept it short, never sent it and have taken it up again in para 3. The marches have failed, the MDC's leadership has failed, its long suffering membership has failed. What seems to lie ahead is a prospect that has, since independence, been unthinkable: a perpetual state of crisis to be overtaken by the ultimate catastophe of a failed state.
I will blog later on what a failed state means to Zimbabweans who have refused to believe that the innate worth of a potentially great society is incapable of restoring itself. Holding out patiently for the natural death of the man who has been held up by cronies, outlaws (and even in-laws), as a model for African leadership had a sort of nobility to it. That was a feasable excuse for failure to jettison a tyrant only so long as there was hope for new and better leadership. That was the best reason for his subjects to believe his opponents' promises of a new dawn - so long as they engaged in peaceful protest. The masses of Zimbabwe had even come to accept, as the price of peace, their slow starvation and death, directly attributable to his crazed leadership.
They have waited in vain and have become too weak in body and spirit to change. `Chinja!' the war cry of the only viable opposition party in twenty five years now rings hollow. If there is no hope of intervention from democratic friends, `chinja' means change all right - but only for the worse.
Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell
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