Moyo’s salarygate based on political ambitions

By Jealousy Mawarire

Recently, the media went into overdrive about the so-called salarygate, un-inquisitively swallowing hook, line and sinker, Professor Jonathan Moyo’s official excuse that the media crusade was in line with provisions in the Zanu-PF election manifesto and the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim Asset) and that any reading outside this ‘official’ line was treacherous and treasonous.

Those who tried to tease out sub-plots behind the crusade were barraged with all sorts of names. This, however, did not successfully convinced some right-thinking Zimbabweans who still believed the salarygate was just another form of the infamous Asiagate, a sublime piece of mythical nonsense propagated by a politically opportunistic individual to try and fight both perceived and imaginary enemies.

Like the salarygate before it, the issue of the endorsement of First Lady Grace Mugabe has been seized by Moyo and a coterie of his media cahoots, particularly in the state media, and used to set-up political foes against President Mugabe and his wife.

In just the same way that Moyo and his media cabal managed to create some delusions around their salarygate rooted in the belief that Zimbabweans are so gullible they can only understand the anti-corruption drive along the Zim Asset, national interest reading and nothing more, he has also set out to play a superhero and undoubted Mugabe apologist portraying and framing his political foes as enemies of the first family.

To ensure his narrative becomes the dominant and presumed hegemonic way of reading the politics at play, both the succession issue in Zanu-PF and its guise in the form of his purported anti-corruption drive, Moyo set out, before, setting the salarygate story in motion, to harness all media organisations through apparently ‘innocent’ visits to the publishing institutions where he began to champion real business concerns of media houses like the need to remove tariffs on the import of newsprint and the need to focus on business reporting as opposed to politics as a way of generating income.

He immediately began to make peace with those he harassed and haunted out of employment in his previous tenure as Information Minister and in some way managed to create some illusions of a repentant former media hangman who has had his own Damascene experience.

In this entire maze, he managed to present a different persona from his previous self yet the real issue of his perchance to control the media for his self-serving interests was always apparent regardless of the many delusions that he tried to feed the nation with.

In fact the delusions were based on an equally warped belief that he carries, whence he thinks he is the smartest guy in town and everyone else is either idiotic or moronic, two adjectives that he is fond of using to describe those who hold different ideas from his.

Such political delusions are the ones that make Moyo think everyone else cannot read inside his political manoeuvres, his obvious control of the media in Zimbabwe through a dubious organisation called Information and Media Panel of Inquiry (Impi), and his apparent agenda setting hand in stories coming out of virtually every publication in the country today.

The appropriately named Impi, in Moyo’s own vernacular, both a war regiment and war itself, is not an innocent grouping of concerned media practitioners, but a carefully thought out media control arm created by the Minister to serve him and usurp the work of the Zimbabwe Media Commission, itself a statutory instrument that is meant to look at the same issues that Impi is now purporting to look into, only that Impi has no statutory obligation to report to any other member of the executive except the Minister.

It is well-known, in politics and media studies, that if you want to have a go at political power, you need to control the ideas industry, set the agenda in the production of cultural products and have both a visible and latent presence in the culture industry and we have to be daft not to see that this is exactly what Moyo is doing.

Surely if Morgan Tsvangirai was guilty of creating parallel government structures during the infamous Government of National Unity (GNU) with his so-called Prime Minister’s department, what is Moyo doing with his Impi?

In fact events are beginning to show. After President Mugabe complained about a so-called media blackout on former reserve bank Governor Dr Gideon Gono and threatened to kick-out whoever was responsible for the blackout, the impi (war) aspect of Moyo’s reaction became apparent.

The Herald chose to censor President Mugabe with the reportage on his visit to Gono’s farm tucked into some corner on page two as if it was a retraction and shockingly left out the President’s dig at the blackout and his threat to kick Moyo out.

To make matters worse, the caption on the President’s front-page picture on the visit did not alert the reader there was a story on the same on page two. If this was not expurgating the President, then we need to be told who has become a bigger newsmaker, President Mugabe or Happison Muchechetere, whose court story dwarfed the President’s visit to Gono’s farm.

As if censoring President Mugabe was not enough, Moyo then went on to summon his Impi (war) group to create a platform to reply to the President’s remarks and went into some esoteric lecture on what he called “possessive journalism” before arrogantly telling Gono he should use his own Financial Gazette, and may be, let Moyo use his own public and independent dailies.

It is quite apparent that, using the so-called salarygate, Moyo successfully set the agenda in the media and managed to portray himself as a super patriot, a clean and astute politician who is beyond any reproach.

He also managed to ensure that whoever became suspicious of the motive behind his so-called media drive against corruption was ruthlessly dealt with through apparently induced news stories and shadowy columnists who never picked anything contrary to his ‘official’ line of thought.

We saw how rabid the media became on anyone who suspected there were some sub-plots to the anti-corruption drive, whether personal, political or factional. The only line that we were obliged to use to understand this hullabaloo was the official one where Moyo told us he was doing this in line with ZimAsset and the national interest.

That virtually no publication sought to examine Moyo’s crusade on corruption against a background of his alleged abuse of $108 000.00 belonging to Ford Foundation in Kenya, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, was not only astounding but a yawning absentee from the anti-corruption drive narrative that no mediaworth its salt could afford to entertain.

Surely there is something called moral high ground and Moyo is nowhere near being a fiscal saint or a non-racketeer as he would like us to believe and any competent media should have been able to tease out these sub-plots rather than just sing from the Minister’s hymn book.

That the so-called salarygate was a political smear-game is neither here nor there and it is incumbent that it should be best understood in the context of stupid factional politics and trying to read it outside is not only a mark of political idiocy but an exercise in political delusion that only fools can buy into.

Certainly Moyo is not a fool and he knows what he is doing, only that he thinks everyone else in this country is mentally dwarfed and that wisdom was born with his political appointment in 2000, died with his expulsion in 2005 and was only resurrected with his readmission into Zanu-PF in 2009.

While these self-serving delusions might work sometimes, Moyo should awaken to the fact he can fool some people sometime, but he cannot fool all the people all the time. MawarireSpeaks.wordpress.com