South Africa rubbishes Moyo attack

By Chris Goko and Thelma Chikwanha    

HARARE – The diplomatic fallout between Harare and Pretoria is escalating after the eccentric legislator ratcheted up his criticism of South African president Jacob Zuma and Sadc yesterday.

Moyo, a former arch critic of Mugabe, said in his latest attacks against Zuma and Sadc that they were being used by the West to remove Mugabe from power.

The Zanu PF politburo member’s perplexing vitriol against Zuma and Sadc was once again delivered via state media, and comes barely three weeks after Mugabe, his lieutenants and aides scrambled to disown similar diatribe from him in the same state media.

Reacting to Moyo’s utterances, a curt Ambassador Lindiwe Zulu, Zuma’s international relations advisor and a key member of the South African facilitation team to the GPA, said neither Sadc nor SA had time for “people who are outside the negotiation ambit”.

“We have said it before that we will not comment on opinions of people who are not part and parcel of the negotiation process. We have the principals and the negotiators of the political parties who agree to the current process. People are free to write opinion pieces,” she told the Daily News from Johannesburg yesterday.

However, there was overwhelming and ringing condemnation of the controversial politician from within the ranks of Zanu PF, with one high-level source saying it was “clear that Jonathan wants to destroy both Zanu PF and President Mugabe”.

“I do not understand why the party continues to tolerate this man. He is clearly out to destroy us, otherwise why else would he want to see us fight with President Zuma, the ANC (African National Congress) and South Africa, who have been our friends for decades and ahead of an important Sadc meeting for that. We urgently need to establish what gives him the temerity to stir this kind of mega problem,” the source said.

A Daily News source in Pretoria, while miffed by Moyo’s “silly and self-defeating” utterances said it was unlikely that South Africa would react as badly as it did the first time that he criticised Zuma.

“It would be unfortunate and to Zimbabwe’s detriment if this ongoing criticism of our president and the facilitation team brought into question Zanu PF’s sincerity and commitment to the GPA (Global Political Agreement) process.

“However, we were assured by senior people, and we took their explanations in good faith, that Moyo neither represented the government nor Zanu PF. It would be good though if somebody in Zanu PF realised that this (Moyo’s attacks) is silly and self-defeating, particularly seeing that he is a senior Zanu PF official,” the source said.

As exclusively revealed by the Daily News last week, Zanu PF’s negotiators to the GPA are under pressure from securocrats and Zanu PF hardliners to toughen their position in the ongoing tripartite negotiations.

As a result, Zuma is now said to be preparing to travel to Harare to meet GPA principals to try and push the negotiations forward, ahead of Sadc’s extraordinary summit on Zimbabwe to be held in Windhoek, Namibia on May 20, after the last round in Cape Town yielded very little progress.

Serious differences are said to have emerged over security sector reforms and the composition of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) at the Cape Town tête-à-tête.

Writing in state media yesterday, Moyo trashed Zuma and Sadc’s on-going mediation efforts saying they “created a treacherous opportunity for weakening the state in Zimbabwe by rendering it vulnerable to hostile foreign interests”.

“The charade of continuing negotiations on a done deal has been to the total detriment of the implementation of the Global Political Agreement (GPA) at great disservice to the public and to the embarrassment of the Sadc guarantors of the GPA, who have all along allowed the anomaly to continue by facilitating false negotiations that should have long ended on September 15, 2008,” he said.

“It is hard to imagine that any Sadc leader would want the security sector of his or her country reformed through extra judicial negotiations, which are neither constitutional nor legal. Proper security sector reforms must always be done and led by the security sector itself and not by third parties operating outside the law under the treacherous cover of negotiations that are in fact not necessary.

“These puppets and their masters will not be allowed to reform something they did not form using the cover of the GPA negotiations under misplaced Sadc facilitation which the UK government apparently wants to use to dictate regime change in the country,” Moyo said.

South Africa has said that it is aware that these kind of articles in the state media are published with official blessing in Zimbabwe. Moyo, who has made it his business to be Mugabe’s loudest defender and bootlicker-in-chief has previously flirted openly with the president’s opponents, including the MDC, and was recently admitted back into Zanu PF after an acrimonious divorce five years ago.

Mugabe then accused him of being part of a plot to topple him. In his state media piece yesterday, the political turncoat also proposed that Zimbabwe’s much anticipated elections should either be held this year or in 2016, a view apparently shared by the country’s securocrats.

Moyo is said be closely linked to the country’s top army and security officials, even as many in Zanu PF accuse him of trying to destroy both Mugabe and Zanu PF from within – just as he allegedly tried to do in 2004. Daily News