Jonathan Moyo’s views on Mugabe exposed

Serial political flip-flopper and Zanu PF propagandist Jonathan Moyo has taken the decision to silence the Daily News from publishing his incisive opinion pieces which he penned during the time he was jumping from one political gathering to another.

Most of the opinion pieces, written mainly for the Zimbabwe Independent between 2008 and 2010 and also published on NewZimbabwe.com, highlight how Moyo views President Robert Mugabe, his vice-presidents and Zanu PF as a party.

Moyo now says Mugabe is his hero.

While the court case between the Daily News and Moyo rages on, the Daily News on Sunday has, due to public demand, decided to extract quotations from Moyo’s well written opinion pieces. The quotations were all taken from websites.

Why Mugabe should go now

Perennial wisdom from divine revelation and human experience dictates that earthly things great or small beautiful or ugly, good or bad, sad or happy, foolish or wise must finally come to an end. It is from this sobering reality that the end of executive rule has finally come for Robert Mugabe who has had his better days after a quarter of a century in power.

That Mugabe must now go is thus no longer a dismissible opposition slogan but a strategic necessity that desperately needs urgent legal and constitutional action by Mugabe himself well ahead of the presidential election scheduled for March 2008 in order to safeguard Zimbabwe’s national interest, security and sovereignty.

One does not need to be a malcontent to see that, after 25 years of controversial rule and with the economy melting down as a direct result of that rule, Mugabe’s continued stay in office has become such an excessive burden to the welfare of the state and such a fatal danger to the public interest of Zimbabweans at home and in the Diaspora that each day that goes by with him in office leaves the nation’s survival at great risk while seriously compromising national sovereignty.

Mugabe now too old, too tired

But the most compelling reasons for Mugabe to resign now have to do with his own fallen standing in and outside the country.

The prevalence of unkind jokes about him on text messages and the Internet say it all. Mugabe now lacks the vision, stature and energy to effectively run the country, let alone his party.

He is without compassion, maybe because he is now too old, too tired and not in the best of health.

His failure to visit stranded families left homeless and suffering from the irrational acts of his own government speaks volumes of his cold and cruel leadership style.

From all discernible indications, Mugabe has lost influence and is now viewed with suspicion or cynicism or both by his peers in the Sadc, African Union and across the developing world where he used to enjoy considerable authority.

Of course, Mugabe is still respected as an old man and he still makes very interesting bombastic speeches that are applauded for their entertainment value and which are full of sound and fury but signifying precious little at the level of policy and action.

Given the foregoing, President Mugabe has no reason whatsoever to continue in office as that is no longer in his personal interest and is most certainly not in the national interest. He just must now go and the fundamental law of the land gives him a decent constitutional exit that he must take while he is still able to do so to save the nation and preserve his legacy.

Mugabe not telling the truth

When Mugabe says the crisis started in 2000 due to the rejection of the land reform programme by Britain and its allies he is not telling the truth. Many in his government and party know that the crisis started on August 16, 1997 when the compensation for veterans of the liberation war became an economic albatross to the fiscus.

It is also a widely known fact that the demands for a new democratic constitution started well before 2000. Indeed, the MDC itself was formed before 2000.

If the truth be told, the 2000 land reform programme was itself a hasty, brutal and chaotic response to serious national problems that were already present.

It was not a sustainable policy action. That brutal and chaotic response was more about Mugabe’s political survival than about redressing historical injustice.

While there can be no doubt about the historic necessity of land reform in Zimbabwe and about the social justice of that necessity, the fact is that the brutal and chaotic response in 2000 necessarily led to serious mistakes being made. Those mistakes need to be corrected without making a bad situation worse or falsifying history through Mkapa’s mediation.

Mugabe’s leadership doomed to fail

On offer is the self-indulgent leadership of Mugabe who is now too old despite his photogenic makeup, has become very tired, visionless and beleaguered.

Mugabe remains in office not because he is in charge of the goings-on in the wider society but largely if not only because of considerations of his personal and family security in a world that is increasingly becoming hostile to former heads of state with unresolved human rights and corruption issues during their rule.

A leader in this kind of a box in which Mugabe now finds himself tends to invariably construct his own political reality which in turn blunts his ability to tell the difference between winning a popular victory and securing a stolen result at the polls.

There is no way such a leader can ever enact correct policies even if they smack him on his face.

This explains why even with the best of intentions by some within his inner circle, Mugabe’s leadership has become inherently limited and in fact doomed to fail.

No wonder his associates are now unable to distinguish between defending their beleaguered boss as a person and defending his principles, human ideals or policies.

Mugabe’s two deputies are not in a better position than him vision-wise.

Vice-President Joice Mujuru is seemingly content with wanting to become executive state president by crisscrossing the country in the glare of the media hoping to win voters by waving “a pigs-and-chicken manifesto” in an economy whose wheels have fallen off.

Mugabe behaving like a cornered rat

Although President Robert Mugabe has of late been displaying bravado by ruthlessly attacking in public some Zanu PF contenders for his 27-year tainted rule, such as Joice Mujuru, and unleashing violence against opposition politicians in police cells, while giving the impression that he is still like an invincible lion, the inescapable home truth visible to all and sundry is that he is now behaving like a cornered rat whose quandary is that every escape route it tries is a dead-end.

This became clear after his astonishing yet revealing indication last week that he is set to dissolve parliament in the next few months to enable him to yet again stand for re-election under controversial circumstances that are certain to widen and deepen Zanu PF divisions.

At best, the threatened dissolution of parliament which has angered Zanu PF MPs is designed to give Mugabe assured campaign assistance from the ruling party’s parliamentary hopefuls who would be forced to support his divisive candidacy in joint presidential and parliamentary elections he wants to call well before the expiry of his current term in March 2008. But there could be another sinister agenda to resuscitate Mugabe’s dead 2010 plan.

In effect, Mugabe does not want to be succeeded by anybody. Zanu PF factional leaders who imagine that they are Mugabe’s preferred successors are living in a fools’ paradise because Mugabe does not want any successor.

Tsvangirai defeated Mugabe

If there is one sobering thing that can be unequivocally said about why the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) has scandalously delayed the announcement of the March 29 presidential election, it is simply that President Robert Mugabe did not win the election and is now desperately trying to steal the result through an unjustified recount because he does not have any prospect of winning a run-off or a re-run.

Had Mugabe won the election, even with less than the absolute majority required under the Electoral Act, Zec would have announced the result ages ago and Zimbabweans would have been spared the constitutional uncertainty and political anxiety that have put the nation on the brink of utter chaos and mayhem.

The simple truth which Zec has found hard to stomach and which Mugabe and his shocked cronies have found hard to swallow is that Morgan Tsvangirai won the presidential election even if with less than the required absolute majority. In other words, Tsvangirai got more votes than Mugabe and thus defeated him.

If the Electoral Act had not been amended after the 2002 presidential election to require a run-off where no candidate gets an absolute majority, Tsvangirai would have been sworn in by now and Zimbabwe would be in a totally new situation under his MDC government and we would not have the current charade of a dissolved cabinet whose defeated ministers are now seeking to unconstitutionally smuggle themselves back into office under spurious but self-serving interpretations of Section 31E of the Constitution.

Mugabe, incoherent, disoriented

The saying that when you are 40, half of you belongs to the past, and when you are 80 virtually all of you is past material, best describes the stubborn reality facing the 83-year old President Robert Mugabe whose dream to remain in power for life is turning into a terrible nightmare as he finds himself trapped between the frustration of his rejected 2010 plan and his hopeless 2008 re-election bid which would leave him and Zanu PF sitting ducks at polls should presidential and parliamentary elections be held together early next year.

Anyone who listened to Mugabe’s addresses at the hurriedly organised national assembly meetings of the Zanu PF youth and women’s leagues in Harare on March 16 and 23 would have noticed how Mugabe came across as an incoherent, disoriented, rambling and tired old man who wants to remain president for life without any compelling national reason.

Throughout his addresses, he was prone to incomprehensible fits of anger and outbursts.

While Mugabe’s irrational desire to remain in office for life by hook or by crook is unfortunate but understandable, it is utterly shocking to see that there are securocrats in his office who are desperate to force his re-election bid through foul means including using at least 14 government ministries that are now doing commissariat work for Mugabe.

The co-ordination work of these ministries is being done by military personnel who have been deployed in all of the country’s 59 districts and 120 constituencies to do political work for Mugabe as they did in 2002 as “the boys on leave” from the army.

Although everyone else can see that Mugabe’s time has gone with the winds, his securocrats want to have the world to believe otherwise. Daily News On Sunday