Through the Wire: Jonathan ‘Comical Ali’ Moyo
By Lance Guma
Ever wondered why people pay attention to political turncoat Jonathan Moyo and his weekly ramblings in the Zanu PF controlled Sunday Mail newspaper?
The Tsholotsho North Zanu PF MP is so brilliantly dishonest Zimbabwe has developed a morbid curiosity to be entertained by his verbose writings. While the failed Tsholotsho Coup mastermind no doubt revels in the attention he misses the point that he is actually the political jester in the collapsing Zanu PF regime.
Professor Moyo has become the ‘Comical Ali’ of Zimbabwean politics, denying with colourful language what every Jack and Jill can see.
Comical Ali
Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf ‘Comical Ali’ became a cult figure owing to his wild claims and colourful language. With his trademark grinning face and wild gesticulations, he spent the last days of the Saddam Hussein regime denying what the entire world could see unfolding.
His colourful appearances earned him the nickname ‘Baghdad Bob’.
Two days before Baghdad fell to US forces, al-Sahhaf claimed that there were no American troops in Baghdad. He claimed Americans were committing suicide by the hundreds at the city’s gates. Behind him were US tanks in the city.
It’s quite tempting to throw the likes of Joseph Chinotimba and the late Border Gezi into this political pot but what makes them more genuine is that they actually believed what they said and did. Although Moyo knows better he spends his time deliberately trying to apply perfume to a decomposing corpse.
Political flip flopper or just political prostitute
Between 2008 and 2010 Moyo made known his negative views on Robert Mugabe, his vice presidents and Zanu PF. He wrote that it was important for Mugabe to step down arguing this was “no longer a dismissible opposition slogan but a strategic necessity that desperately” needed urgent action.
Some of the more famous headlines for his articles included: “Why Mugabe should go now”; “Mugabe now too old, too tired”; ‘Mugabe not telling the truth’; ‘Mugabe leadership doomed to fail’; ‘Mugabe behaving like a cornered rat’; “Tsvangirai defeated Mugabe”; “Mugabe incoherent, disoriented”.
Moyo said under Mugabe’s rule the economy had melted and that the Zanu PF leader was “now too old, too tired.” He felt “the prevalence of unkind jokes about Mugabe “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.”
Murambatsvina Moyo
Moyo criticized Mugabe over the 2005 Operation Murambatsvina exercise when nearly a million people were displaced. Mugabe’s “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,” he wrote.
Turning to the land reform exercise Moyo said: “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.”
Moyo argued this “was not a sustainable policy action,” and that the “brutal and chaotic response was more about Mugabe’s political survival than about redressing historical injustice.”
Mugabe was “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.”
Moyo said Tsvangirai won and beat Mugabe
Commenting on the March 2008 election Moyo said:
“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.”
Moyo verbally savaged Vice President Joice Mujuru saying she 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.”
Moyo and the Americans
Ironically Moyo accused his political opponents of being “British-funded political tools of regime change” even though leaked US diplomatic cables later alleged that Moyo advised former American ambassador to Zimbabwe Mr Christopher Dell on how to penetrate and oust Mugabe from power.
So you see folks when Moyo wastes acres of space in the Zanu PF controlled newspapers either praising Mugabe and Zanu PF or attacking the MDC-T and Tsvangirai, all he succeeds in doing is make himself an object of ridicule like Comical Ali in Iraq. Who can take such a political flip-flopper seriously?
The Gukurahundi disclosure by Moyo
Several years ago Moyo disclosed in his C.V that his late father (a councillor in Tsholotsho Rural District Council) was a victim of the Gukurahundi Massacres committed by the Fifth Brigade army units who were ordered into the Matabeleland and Midlands provinces by Mugabe.
“My father is late. He was killed in 1983 in Tsholotsho in a tragic encounter with elements of the Zimbabwe National Army who took his life during Zimbabwe’s post-independence dark period generally referred to as the Gukurahundi Era,” Moyo said in an 11-page CV submitted to Zanu PF.
Why anyone can work for and defend someone or a party behind their father’s death defies logic, unless maybe he was lying or stretching the truth?
Jonathan Moyo cheer-leading Brigade
Even the coterie of journalists who cheerlead and feed off every word Moyo vomits will never be able to sanitize his comical status. It’s even more hilarious that he is branded a key Zanu PF ‘strategist’. In a dictatorship any strategy backed by force will work. It does not need to be clever at all.
The person who knows Moyo best is the 88 year old geriatric he is working to defend now. President Mugabe once said “No Jonathan, you are clever, but you lack wisdom. You are educated, but you do not have wisdom.”
