We Were Right. Again.

Trudy Stevenson is going to Senegal as ambassador, it has now been confirmed today. Mutambara faced the humiliation of his first choice, Siyabonga Ncube, running away from the training. The media caught up with him as he ran around to try and buy a car in the city under the MPs Car Loan Scheme, which he considered a better way to spend his time than training to be an ambassador. The confusion in the Mutambara MDC is being fuelled by the machinations of Morgan Tsvangirai, who is courting Mutambara's MPs openly and even using the Speaker of parliament in some of his dirty tricks.

Harare, Zimbabwe, 30 August 2009

Today the Sunday Mail finally caught up with the scoop I gave you last week regarding Trudy Stevenson being an ambassador by the smaller MDC led by Arthur Mutambara, also one of the Deputy Prime Ministers of Zimbabwe.

It turns out Stevenson is not going to Sudan as I had announced. A friend on Facebook did point out when I posted the article that we have no embassy in Sudan.

Instead, Stevenson is going to Senegal, the French-speaking North African country when and if Mugabe decides that he is going to post the MDC ambassadors.

As I told you in that scoop story, the appointment of Stevenson, who is the MDC Mutambara Secretary for Research and Policy was in response to the refusal by the party's first choice, Siyabonga Ncube, to take up that post.

He ran away from the training of these new ambassadors being done by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs without telling his party after Morgan Tsvangirai promised him heaven, earth and the galaxy if he crossed over to the MDC-Tsvangirai together with the suspended Mutambara MPs and others that Tsvangirai is courting.

Siyabonga Ncubes appointment was supposed to create a parliamentary vacancy for Gibson Sibanda, Deputy President of the MDC to fill. He is currently in government illegally (as Minister of something or other in Mutambara's office) because the Constitution clearly states that he can only hang on to that job if he is a member of the legislature.

What has now happened is that Mutambara has been forced to downgrade the position of his deputy president. He is no longer referred to as a Minister but is officially known as a "Special Advisor in the Office of The Deputy Prime Minister!

Tsvangirai is causing havoc in the MDC-M. He is seriously courting Mutambara MPs in order to avert the disappearance of his parliamentary majority in the wake of the assault on it by Mugabe through the arrests of MDC Tsvangirai MPs.

In doing this, Tsvangirai has also enlisted the help of the Speaker of Parliament, who is the MDC-Tsvangirai chairman. He has been attending meetings held by the MPs Mutambara expelled and addressing them as an MDC Tsvangirai official.

Mutambara and the best Constitutional brains in Zimbabwe, Welshman Ncube (Secretary General of the MDC-M) had to issue a public statement accusing the Speaker of corruption and threatening to report him to the Anti-Corruption Commission if he failed to kick the dismissed parliamentarians out of the House.

The Speaker complied one day ahead of the deadline they had given him.

These expelled MPs are an enigma.

Some people think that they won their seats only because of their personal popularity and hence will carry the seats for MDC-Tsvangirai at by-elections.

Others point out that they were standing under the banner of Simba Makoni's presidential candidature. Makoni got 45% of the vote in Matabeleland, where the MPs have their seats and it is thought that their wins were informed by how people voted in the presidential election.

All the same, it will be a bruising battle for these seats, especially now that it has been confirmed that Mugabe refuses to consider extending the ban on the GPA parties contesting the seats against each other in the by-elections.