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Now the party’s national leadership has moved to try to pepper over the internal strife by demoting deputy national spokesperson Ms Thabitha Khumalo to create a soft-landing for Deputy Prime Minister Ms Thokozani Khupe who is battling to wrest control of the party in Matabeleland.

Reports last week indicated that members were defecting en masse to the MDC formation led by Professor Welshman Ncube and efforts by party leader Mr Morgan Tsvangirai to quell the infighting have come to naught. The factionalism that has riven the party in Bulawayo can be traced back to the MDC-T congress last year where Ms Khupe was challenged for the post of vice-president by Ms Khumalo.  Although she won, Ms Khupe has not forgiven Ms Khumalo for daring to unseat her and the gloves appear to have come off amid reports that the MDC-T vice-president’s faction intends to field another candidate to challenge Ms Khumalo in her Bulawayo East constituency.

We reported last week that Ms Khumalo’s position became untenable when she openly challenged Ms Khupe. Insiders told us that her enemies within the party used her now infamous crusade to legalise prostitution as a weapon to engineer her downfall. “The motive for her ouster is obvious. Ms Khumalo could not have remained in that post after her bold challenge to Ms Thokozani Khupe at last year’s congress. This is a symptom of an internal  struggle that has been going on in the party. The party also felt she was tarnishing its image after her controversial calls for legalising prostitution. Her utterances are not in tandem with the dignity of the party and its policies,” said an insider.

The infighting in Bulawayo is a microcosm of deeper and bigger problems of factionalism cascading down from the national leadership where it is an open secret that party leader Mr Tsvangirai is in combat with his secretary-general Mr Tendai Biti who has ambitions of wresting his post. At the party congress held in Bulawayo, party cadres were divided with one faction belonging to Mr Tsvangirai while another one was led by Mr Biti.

It was reported then that Mr Biti harboured presidential ambitions although he did not throw his hat into the ring to challenge Mr Tsvangirai. His faction reportedly had the likes of Mr Nelson Chamisa, then party spokesman. The MDC-T problems in Matabeleland are therefore a mirror of the state of the entire party. Mr Gorden Moyo, the Bulawayo provincial chairman, is  reported to have been parachuted to his position at the behest of Mr Tsvangirai and this did not go down well with other senior party leaders who felt Mr Moyo was too “green” to be entrusted with such a senior post.

Since then, the party structures in Bulawayo, particularly in Mzilikazi and Makokoba, have known no peace. Youths belonging to different factions have been engaged in violent clashes while their leaders haggle. Apart from the infighting, the MDC-T, which rode on a protest vote in Matabeleland, is fast losing popularity due to the ineptitude of its legislators who seem to have a preoccupation with trivialities while turning a blind eye to real issues affecting the people.

When they are not calling for the legalisation of prostitution and other vices like homosexuality, they are busy thinking up other bizarre ideas like calling on women not to bath and be unkempt to deter rapists. While we accept that some MDC-T legislators gate-crashed their way into national politics using protest votes, they should have taken time to develop themselves particularly academically but it seems they have been busy enriching themselves to think of the electorate.

We pray that Zimbabweans have become wiser and can now see the MDC-T for what it is. Clearly, the party has no capacity to govern this country. It has a leader who can hardly manage his private life let alone his party and God forbid what he would do if entrusted with managing the lives of 13 million Zimbabweans. We rest our case.