George Charamba vs Jonathan Moyo war erupts

It’s a mini-war that has been bubbling underneath the surface. On Thursday however, everything erupted as President Robert Mugabe’s spokesman George Charamba launched verbal missiles at Higher Education Minister Jonathan Moyo.

Using a radio interview on ZiFM, Charamba accused Moyo and the so-called Generation 40 faction in Zanu PF of pretending to be behind the First Family (especially First Lady Grace Mugabe) when in actual fact they harboured their own presidential ambitions.

“One tragedy of those little fellas, and I call them little fellas, they confuse media skills with social skills. They think you can scale up a political ladder by tweeting (clear reference to Moyo who is active on twitter), who think when you manipulate one or two headlines, you have a social base for launching your stupid ambitions, they will come to grief, get it from me. I am not speaking as a permanent secretary but President Mugabe’s press secretary.”

“How does the First Lady talk about succession of her husband, does it make sense to you?” he said. “These are people who think by sheer proximity, they can build messages around the First Family. They are fools, get it from me, they are big fools and I hope someday they will come back to their senses.

“It tells you big book minus social skills comes to grief. Getting learned and getting educated are different things. What I am seeing here is a projection of high learning and poor social skills.

“You don’t scale up to the level of secretary for Women’s League without having a political sense. As I said, this is the First Family, they will allow you a very long rope, but there is a limit. You can’t keep stretching the rope, at some point, the knot will tighten. I know what must stop, it is this tomfoolery.”

“In the first place, who says President Mugabe won’t be there for 2018?” queried Mr Charamba. “Here are these ‘God’s deputies’ who know when Mugabe will die, who can tell who should not be Vice President and who should be? Who can tell who must succeed Mugabe when they have killed him off?

“And meanwhile, we must accept that they are not ambitious themselves, they don’t want to be Vice Presidents themselves, but they know who must not be. They don’t want to be President themselves, but they know who must not succeed and when that does not succeed, who does?’

Charamba said only President Mugabe had the mandate to appoint the party and Government leadership, including Vice Presidents. He said attempts to frame a discourse around removing either of the Vice Presidents was in fact trying to usurp President Mugabe’s powers.

“The President of Zimbabwe, acting on the outcome of the (Zanu-PF) Congress, appointed two Vice Presidents in 2014 — Vice President Mnangagwa and Vice President Mphoko.

“This agrees with our Constitution. This agrees with the outcome, with the Zanu-PF congress. This agrees with the values of Zanu-PF, particularly values borne out of the Unity Accord. The President is the appointing authority and he has given us two Vice Presidents.

“Who is the guilty party, the one who asks a little civil servant why he is working with this or that Vice President or the one who comes forth and says, ‘hey little civil servant, don’t like this Vice President, like this one?’ Is he not substituting the President as the appointing authority?

“There are many sinister minds who speak in the name of the President, who are in fact successionists and it won’t be long before the headlines give you the story. Some have been meeting nicodemously with the People First, but they are still in Zanu-PF.”

“Here are little men with absolutely no iota of history behind them thinking they can one day emerge as leaders of this country with their little minds thinking baldness is age, it isn’t,” he said.

“My boss’ tenure is being discussed by his juniors and this is what makes me angry,” said Mr Charamba. “When you point that out they give you a faction. They sit there with some little newsmen, compose headlines, repeat arguments that they were saying when they were working with me and they think they are being discreet.

“They think we don’t see that. The tragedy is to try and be clever than the people. To think that you are the brightest brain around, that’s tragic. But something must give in now. I am having to fend off bad press from within Zanu-PF not from MDC, but from within Zanu-PF 24/7, from my own fellow party members, yes I am a civil servant, but I am Zanu-PF.

“They sit in the Politburo and I sit there as an official and I know what goes on there. Then following day, not only have they leaked the stuff, but they do so in their poor English, which I know and I am supposed to sit there like a Happy Buddha and keep my mouth mum when they are discussing the fate of the President, my boss, botching the subject of succession on whose behalf? How do you advance a Zanu-PF agenda by speaking about its own termination?”

Even though Charamba did not mention names, snippets of his interview that were aired by ZiFM throughout the day to advertise the full interview drew furious tweets from Jonathan Moyo who said, among other things, ‘’George Charamba’s media voices are no longer of a civil servant but of a politician in aid of a desperate faction. That’s unacceptable!..

‘’George Charamba must not abuse his civil servant role as Info Perm Sec to serve successionists. That will be resisted as it was in 2014!’’ Moyo tweeted angrily.