Opposition Transform Zimbabwe (TZ) leader, Jacob Ngarivhume has said meaningful alliances among political parties remain the best option available ahead of the crucial harmonised elections set for next year.
This is despite his political outfit having pulled out of the MDC Alliance, under which it had contested the 2018 polls.
Speaking Monday on This Morning on Asakhe, a CITE online programme hosted on Twitter Space, Ngarivhume said TZ’s decision to pull out of the alliance was driven by the need to strengthen their young political party.
“Remember we’re still quite a young political party compared to the other existing political parties in the country and we felt that we had learned our lessons working in the alliance, but we still needed to grow our bone and nerve as a political organization,” he said.
He was quick to say that the idea of alliances should never be discarded in politics.
“Should we desire then to come back into an alliance we hopefully would be even stronger and ready to do more than at that time,” he said.
“So, the decision really was not to say alliances are bad or are wrong, but it was for our party to grow itself. The reason why we went into an alliance in 2018 was that we felt that it was the best way to go. Collecting and working together to fight dictatorship and to topple dictatorship is the way to go.”
He further said: “If you don’t pull your resources together, if you don’t come together if you work in silos, it doesn’t help when you are dealing with a dictatorship, especially an entrenched dictatorship like we have in ZANU-PF. So, we absolutely feel and believe that we need to come together with other players and ensure that we approach elections from an aggregated point of view. So we absolutely believe in alliances.”
He emphasized the importance of value and meaning benefits in pacts.
“But of course it’s not just about believing in alliances and getting in alliances. You have to make sure that you get into an alliance with people who think like you, with whom you share similar values and with who you also feel that you have the best chance to succeed,” he said.
“You don’t just want to get into an alliance for the sake of it, you want to make sure that once you get into an alliance, you succeed and we are very much aware that we need such an arrangement in Zimbabwe.”
