Profile: Morgan Tsvangirai

The elections in Zimbabwe have been in the news for quite sometime now. Although the Presidential results haven’t been declared as yet, the official election results state that the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party has won 99 seats out of the 210 seats. President Mugabe’s party Zanu-PF won only 97 seats. This is the first time since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 that Robert Mugabe’s party has lost its parliamentary majority. Amidst all this chaos, Morgan Tsvangirai is emerging as a credible challenger to President Mugabe.

Born on March 10, 1952, Morgan Tsvangirai has risen from being a worker in a mine to becoming one of the most important political figures in Zimbabwe. He has held the positions of a trade unionist, human rights activist before he became the President of the mainstream MDC in 1999, the main opposition party in Zimbabwe.

Tsvangirai, a product of important social movements in Zimbabwe, which include the labour and constitutional reform movements, was also the former Secretary General of the powerful Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). He was also the the founding chairperson of the National Constitutional Assembly, a group that advocates for a new constitution for Zimbabwe.

The eldest of nine children, Tsvangirai left school while a teenager to help support his family. The catalyst for Tsvangirai's transformation was his career in the trade unions Tsvangirai became the branch chairman of the Associated Mine Workers Union and was later elected into the executive of the National Mine Workers Union. In 1989 he became the Secretary-General of the ZCTU, the umbrella trade union organization in the country.

As Zimbabwe's economy declined and workers' living standards plummeted, the ZCTU took an increasingly political role.

When Mugabe tried to raise income tax to pay pensions for veterans of the 1970’s war of independence, ZCTU’s nationwide strike had forced him to back down.

It was Tsvangirai who led the ZCTU away from its alliance with the ruling Zanu PF. As his power and that of the movement grew, his relationship with the government deteriorated. He has also been a victim of premeditated and government-inspired harassment and violence. There have been three assassination attempts, which include the 1997 attempt, where unknown assailants burst into his tenth story office and tried to throw him out of the window.

As reported in BBC, on September 2000, he told a rally of his MDC, "If Mugabe does not go peacefully, he will be removed by force." The 52-year-old eldest son of a bricklayer says this was not a threat of armed rebellion but a warning of popular discontent. Soon after the rally, he was arrested on charges of threatening the president. The charges were later on dismissed.

Again, in the 2003, he was arrested on charges for inciting violence. In March 2007, he was arrested for the third time. This time he was put in prison and was tortured badly. "He was in bad shape, he was swollen very badly. He was bandaged on the head. You couldn't distinguish between the head and the face and he could not see properly," said Chagonda, an attorney, to Reuters after visiting the Harare police station where Tsvangirai was being held.

Morgan Tsvangirai is the figurehead for all the disparate groups opposed to Mugabe: unemployed and low-wage black workers; wealthy white farmers and industrialists and ethnic Ndebeles who remember the government's murderous campaign against them in the early 1980s. Mugabe calls Tsvangirai an "ignoramus" because of his humble background and lack of education. But, with the election results, it seems as if the “ignoramus” will bring an end to the Mugabe’s 28-year-old rule.