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| Lothario: Tsvangirai has been linked with a string of women since his wife's tragic passing in a car accident in 2009 |
There's something incongruous about how Zimbabwean independent
media journalists at home and in the Diaspora are reporting the debacle
surrounding Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai's marriage-that-allegedly-never-was.
Whilst the state-controlled Herald
has, predictably, gleefully reported on the 'union' and its attendant soap
operatic saga, the independent press has bizarrely preoccupied itself with
efforts to ‘uncover’ the ‘truth’ about the origins of claims that Tsvangirai
had married his lover, Locadia Tembo, a wealthy businesswoman hailing from a
traditionally ZANU PF family and whose sister is an MP in President Mugabe’s
party.
Newzimbabwe.com published a story entitled The
curious case of Tsvangirai’s marriage on Thursday which sought to reconcile
the gaps between the Tembo family’s claims of a marriage between their daughter
and the Prime Minister on the one hand, and denials of such a union by
Tsvangirai’s spokesman Luke Tamborinyoka on the other. The story quoted
journalist and political commentator Pedzisayi Ruhanya who suggested that
Tamborinyoka’s denials correctly reflected Tsvangirai’s position on the alleged
marriage. Further, Ruhanya averred that Tsvangirai could be a victim of
factions in his party that are trying to play matchmaker for him in a bid to
gain influence and control over him.
SW Radio Africa took it a notch further with a story also
published on Thursday alleging an apparent conspiracy
to corner Tsvangirai into marriage. The story also quoted Tsvangirai’s
aides dismissing the veracity of the marriage claims. Ruhanya also features in
this story, and this time he openly fingers Tsvangirai ally and co-Home Affairs
Minister Theresa Makone as the troublesome matchmaker whose interference in the
Prime Minister’s private life portends ill not only for Tsvangirai himself, but
for the MDC-T’s overall mission to deliver democratic change. It is hard to
quarrel with Ruhanya’s perspective on the goings-on within the MDC-T as he is
solidly well-informed on the subject.
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| Married or merely 'damaged'? Tembo is said to be carrying Tsvangirai's twins |
All this is very well and makes for interesting reading too,
what with the sense of political intrigue and sex scandal it throws up all at
once. Indeed, the story has provided much comic relief to legislators in
Parliament, where the Prime Minister was yesterday mockingly
hailed as a ‘ZANU PF’ son-in-law by MPs from that party as he arrived for
the national budget presentation by Finance Minister Tendai Biti.
However, what I found most disturbing and disheartening
about the independent media’s reporting (I’m not addressing the Herald for
obvious reasons – they have no pretensions about their partisanship!) on this
latest Tsvangirai debacle was their apparent diversion of popular attention
from the real controversies of this episode. What’s beyond dispute is that the
Prime Minister has made yet another young Zimbabwean woman pregnant, and out of
wedlock. Immediately after official denials from Tsvangirai’s office rolled
into newsrooms, alarm bells should have rung long and shrill about the falling
moral probity of a national leader, a father figure, a grandfather and,
inevitably, a role model for young men across the country.
The confirmation by his office of Tsvangirai having paid
damages to the Tembo family in acknowledgement of his responsibility for
Locadia’s pregnancy should have elicited hard questions by the media about the
growing notoriety of the Prime Minister’s salacious lifestyle in the wake of
his wife Susan’s tragic passing in 2009. The insistence of the Prime Minister’s
office that Tsvangirai had only paid damages and no marriage had taken place
seems to put it beyond doubt that Tsvangirai has no intentions to take Locadia
as his lawfully wedded wife now or any time in the future. Otherwise, why create
all this hullabaloo between two people who have every intention to live
together happily ever after?
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| One notch in along string? The PM with Arikana Chihombori |
Journalists are no secret-keepers for the PM and they’re
doing him no favours by failing to hold up his increasingly embarrassing
lifestyle to public scrutiny under the specious excuse that it is his private
business. Well, for what it’s worth, it ceases to be his private business if
young people living in one of the most HIV/Aids-affected societies in
Sub-Saharan Africa should find encouragement to eschew condom use because their
Prime Minister goes ‘bareback’ and still appears untouched by disease.
You might say that’s a presumptuous conclusion, but not so
if you factor in poor Loreta Nyathi, the young Bulawayo girl whom the Prime Minister
allegedly knocked up and left to raise his son on her own and whome he claimed to not remember. And that brings me
to another worrying point – this apparent sowing of wild oats by Tsvangirai.
One expects an irresponsible young man who knows no better – nhubu yomunhu - to leave a litany of
baby mamas across the country, not the Prime Minister! Anywhere in the
civilised world, this unbecoming and morally reprehensible behaviour would have
haunted any politician into resignation, but not so in Zimbabwe.
Powerful men have carte blanche to behave outrageously when
it comes to sexual affairs, and society tends to acquiesce to this appalling
indulgence. Journalists sustain it by nibbling at the periphery of these disquieting
moral contradictions, preferring to leave the core of the matter publicly
untouched. They do gossip of course, over a beer or two, about all the
skirt-chasing and altogether unbecoming behaviour of national leaders which
they’re privy to.
Perhaps the new crop of national leaders from the MDC
believes that any public scrutiny of their sexual lives is unfair, since many
of their ZANU PF colleagues have enjoyed more than 30 years sexual and material
profligacy unmolested by hostile press publicity. That is largely true, of
course – many ZANU PF politicians have, over the decades, sired multitudes of
fatherless children and sunk into putrefying sexual scandals involving small
houses and even under age girls as well as gay lovers, in spite of their
leader’s trenchant homophobia.
However, these ‘Chinja’
leaders have come into public life at a new historical juncture, and they have
found a generation that seeks to escape the scourge of HIV infection and make
up for the country’s sad loss of human capital over the last 20 years. Key to
that survival is the restoration of its moral fibre, which can only be achieved
by this generation taking responsibility for its future. The growing readiness
to be tested and to know one’s HIV status means this generation is ready for openness
and accountability in moral as in political matters.
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| Journalist Pedzisai Ruhanya: 'Romance will shape Tsvangirai's destiny'. |
This is the generation that Prime Minister Tsvangirai wants
to lead as president of the country. He may very well still do so in future,
but presently his own personal affairs are an incorrigible mess. Hardly the
picture of inspiration for aspiring young Zimbabweans, and firebrand independent
politician Margaret Dongo is right to excoriate Tsvangirai for ‘dropping
his pants everywhere’ and impregnating women. Pedzisai Ruhanya’s insightful
observation that romance
could shape Tsvangirai’s destiny appears even more illuminating in light of
recent developments.