‘Jonathan Moyo haunted by his past’

By Jealousy Mawarire

Following my opinion piece in the Daily News last Thursday, in which I exposed professor Jonathan Moyo’s strategy of inviting fellow weevils to destroy Zanu PF from within, he reacted by causing a  strategic meeting of Zimpapers senior staffers in Victoria Falls at the weekend.

Among other things, Moyo resolved to create dirty stuff to try and tarnish my image and that of the security sector by repeating Roy Bennett and Baba Jukwa’s allegations that my organisation, the Centre for Elections and Democracy in Southern Africa (Cedsa) was a creation of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO).

That Moyo, in 2014, for factional political expediency, repeats, with vigour and astonishing insincerity, a tired argument made in 2012 by former MDC treasurer-general Roy Bennett and an opposition political mascot Baba Jukwa, leaves me wondering whether Baba Jukwa was getting his so-called Zanu PF politburo expositions from the likes of Moyo.

In his frantic efforts to endear himself with President Robert Mugabe, Moyo is desperately trying to portray everyone, serve for his factional frenemies, as forces gathering to plot the Mugabe’s ouster.

Sources at the weekend meeting in the resort town revealed that I was under discussion at the meeting where the editors were told through Moyo’s proxies that I was  working with the CIO and that I made the 2013 Constitutional Court application as a calculated move to stampede Mugabe to an early election that he would lose.

The sources added that the editors were told spurious allegations that my opinion piece was published in the Daily News because the paper was fronting Vice President Joice Mujuru’s interests via the CIO and that someone within the top echelons in the organisation had written the piece, not me.

While the reasons for Moyo’s hallucinations may be varied, the objectives for my court application are very clear in my founding affidavit and the many media interviews I gave during the time.

It is quite surprising today that Moyo, who all along has been bragging that he masterminded my court application in order to facilitate Mugabe’s re-election is suddenly singing a different tune, now that I came out to refute his fibs, and has suddenly began to see a plot to oust president Mugabe in a court application that he had unscrupulously usurped and claimed was responsible for the re-election of the incumbent.

Such political somersaults can only come from a political turncoat or a desperate political opportunist who thinks the whole world is indebted to him and should understand things from his point of view only, no matter how silly his prognoses are.

It is not surprising that Moyo sees the ouster of Mugabe in anything that his political opponents are doing because the ouster of the president is his preoccupation and has also sadly become a fixation to him.

The only problem that Moyo has is that there is irrefutable evidence that the removal from office of Mugabe has long been his pre-occupation and the several newspaper articles he has penned to this effect stick out as sore thumbs to remind him he can never wish anything good to our president.

As recent as 2007, he wrote some damning newspaper articles in various publications insisting that Mugabe should go as a matter of urgency and that his continued stay in office was a huge liability and strategic danger to the State and the country’s economy.

He wrote: “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”, adding that, “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”.

He argued that his political reading of the time left “Mugabe with one real option that he must now exercise: to resign in terms of the Constitution of the land and to allow Zimbabweans to choose a constitutional successor now. The nation is bleeding and it would be very irresponsible to expect Zimbabweans to wait until 2008 for the presidential election”.

Just as he did in 2007, Moyo cannot wait for 2018 or 2023 for a constitutional regime change through elections but is trying to use the Zanu PF elective congress to aid his bid to oust Mugabe around February 2015 and his first strategy is to influence the outcome of the December congress first before going for the jugular in the new year.

What Moyo is trying to do is not surprising and is a continuation of his regime change agenda that he started during his days in the CIA-funded Ford Foundation and that Moyo is a regime change agent is neither here nor there and as he normally says “you don’t need to be a rocket scientist” to make that exposition.

As observed by James Petras, in a paper titled The Ford Foundation and the CIA, the “Ford Foundation-CIA connection was a deliberate, conscious joint effort to strengthen US imperial cultural hegemony and to undermine left-wing political and cultural influence” and often intellectuals like Moyo were used to attack world leaders who are seen as leftists and Marxist in orientation like Mugabe.

Petras also argues that intellectuals who were used by the CIA, through Ford Foundation, like Moyo were, often times, CIA operatives since there was an interchange of personnel to an extent one could not be working for Ford Foundation without being a CIA operative.

He observes that, “From its very origins there was a close structural relation and interchange of personnel at the highest levels between the CIA and the Ford Foundation” and the head of Ford Foundation in 1954, Richard Bissell became special assistant to the CIA boss Allen Dulles and this “structural tie was based on the common imperial interests which they shared” and that “the result of their collaboration was the proliferation of a number of journals and access to the mass media which pro-US intellectuals used to launch vituperative polemics against Marxists and other anti-imperialists”.

That Mugabe is an anti-imperialist is an open secret and that Moyo used to attack him during his time at Ford Foundation and after, is public knowledge, and one can only understand Moyo’s deep-seated hatred of Mugabe from the point of view of his US benefactors.

It is for this reason that Moyo should be reminded that we know he has unfinished business with Mugabe and his pretence to be a loyal servant of the president does not find any traction with some of us.

Moyo’s behind-the-scenes scheming has been on-going for some time, and is informed by his hatred for both Mugabe and Vice President Joice Mujuru whom he sees as a spoiler to his regime change plot. Moyo demonstrated, in 2007, that he hates both the president and his deputy when he wrote: “Mugabe has publicly demonstrated his leadership incapacity to make way for an able and dynamic successor by succumbing to manipulative tribal pressure from a clique in his party on November 18, 2004 at a politburo meeting that unprocedurally and unconstitutionally amended Zanu PF’s constitution to guarantee the imposition and ascendancy of Mujuru to the vice-presidency three days before the Zanu PF membership was due to elect a new top leadership and central committee”.

It is now clear that Moyo’s regime change plan has to overcome two formidable Zanu PF forces, Mugabe and his deputy Mujuru and that, now, as it was in 2004, the Zanu PF elective congress presents Moyo with an opportunity to exercise his long-time fixation — changing the power matrix in Zanu PF and consequently ousting Mugabe and his deputy.

*Mawarire is a trained journalist and executive director for the Centre for Elections and Democracy in Southern Africa. He writes in his own capacity. Mawarire has challenged Information minister, Jonathan Moyo to respond to this opinion.