Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the main opposition party to Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF, has broken his rceent silence to explain why the increasingly splintered Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) acquiesced to the recent Constitutional changes that Thabo Mbeki helped broker. Speaking in Masvingo at the party's eighth anniversary celebrations, Tsangirai argued that “The objective of talking to Zanu PF is to create a free and fair election environment in this country.” I still wonder if the MDC compromises qualify as pragmatism, optimism, or desperation and suspect that there is a convergence of the three elements involved.