Was Moyo really fighting Zanu PF from within?

By Dr Alex Magaisa

I have heard it said on more than a few occasions that Professor Jonathan Moyo got into Zanu PF in order to destroy it from within. Indeed, it has been said that these were his words, that the only way to beat Zanu PF is to join and defeat it from inside although I cannot confirm whether or not this is an accurate representation. 

I have to say that in the beginning this seemed like a plausible line but only because many of us who used to read the Professor’s vicious, daring and brilliant criticism of President Mugabe and Zanu PF could not come to terms with the fact that he was now not only working for them but had become the high priest of the regime. It was completely unbelievable and we wanted to make sense of it.

So someone came up with this theory that this is what the clever Professor was up to. And many, most likely out of desperation and perhaps the natural desire of humankind to salvage something good out of a patently unfavourable situation began to believe this to be true. You create your own reality and you cling onto it as if it were the actual reality.

But as time went by and as events and conduct manifested the argument lost weight. It diminished so badly until it had none.

Interestingly, Vice President Joyce Mujuru came out earlier this year and for the first time we heard a senior Zanu PF figure making this argument not directly against the Professor but we all knew who was she was referring to. In a startling statement that defied reason, she said the anti-corruption drive was a project to divide and destroy Zanu PF. Professor Moyo, an information minister, had become the face of the anti-corruption drive. And this was being viewed with suspicion.

Visiting former central bank Governor Gono’s chicken farm a few months ago, President Mugabe spoke in tongues, saying it was not good to target his favourite banker using the media. We all thought maybe Gono had done the schoolboy thing and had run up to the teacher to complain that there was a bully in the playground.

Now the big man himself, the boss of all bosses (the Capo di Tutti Capi, as they say in the Mafia) President Mugabe, has come out with the same line and unlike his deputy, he has not spoken in tongues. He characterises the Professor and his group as zvipfukuto (weevils). Now anyone who is familiar with the industry and modus operandi of a weevil knows that it drills and works its way into the heart of the seed. It carefully eats everything inside, leaving only a shell. The seed remains perfect on the outside, the farmer might not notice that all he has left is just a shell.

Clearly, the President believes the line that the Professor is a mole who came into Zanu PF to destroy it from within. But he is the one who appointed him in the first place in 2000. And again in 2013, 9 years after he first ‘disappointed’ him, to use the Professor’s own words after he was relieved of his duties at the time. Has someone important got the ear of the President? We expressed shock the other day when we read in The Herald a correspondent saying former central bank Governor Gideon Gono was a “house nigger”. And we asked: if Gono is a house nigger, doesn’t that make his boss a slave master? And we know that President Mugabe was Gono’s boss.

But I am intrigued that this view that the Professor’s mission was to destroy Zanu PF from within seems to have currency beyond his Zanu PF detractors. Embedded in this view is the notion that his was in fact therefore an heroic mission. It is a view that I do not find persuasive. If that was indeed the mission then it had far too much collateral damage to justify its purpose. But I am willing and happy to be educated. Did he go in there, like a chipfukuto, to eat the Zanu PF seed from within?

Meanwhile, for the next week, we will be having a Zimasset proverb of the day. Today’s proverb is one that is in line with our post: “If you choose to set a mouse-trap in a field that has recently been burnt, you must know that your buttocks are likely to get dirty”.

The above article was a Facebook post by Dr Alex Magaisa and re-published with his permission