The sitting MPs are likely to be the biggest challenge is they will claim they have established rapport with the people over the years.
Another obvious thing is that all the parties will see it as an opportunity to have their people in parliament. The talks are, therefore, likely to falter due to the power equation.
Will the parties hold primary elections to decide on a common candidate? If their membership records were well organised, that would have been an option as they would allow all the registered members of the parties involved to vote in the primary elections.
Besides membership registers not being in order, there is the logistical challenge of organising such primary elections, including the lack of financial resources. An option would be for each party to have so many people forming an electoral college, but the larger parties would cry foul as they would prefer that members of the electoral college be determined proportionally.
One option could be to have sitting MPs who survived the primary election being allowed to contest in their constituencies and share the remainder of the constituencies. However, the parties with current MPs who were dethroned in the primary elections would cry foul as they would claim those seats belong to them.
Another equally controversial proposal would be for the parties to stick to constituencies they won in 2008 and share the rest of the constituencies equally. Here there would be issues with MPs who crossed the floor.
What makes it even more difficult is that at the grassroots level, some of the members have deep rooted hatred of officials from other parties. A solution to this would be to field the most popular candidate, one who has a better chance of winning without votes from other parties. How to agree on the popular candidates would be the biggest headache.
If all the efforts to come up with a common candidate fails, I, as one who wants to see Mugabe go at all costs, would do the right thing and vote for the candidate who I think has the biggest chance of defeating Mugabe, using results of opinion polls and crowd pulling capacity as a basis. Mugabe must go. Make your vote count. – Benjamin Chitate, New Zealand
Post published in: Letters to the Editor