Ex-minister to challenge Mugabe in 2018

By Jeffrey Muvundusi

Former Industry minister Nkosana Moyo has hinted at challenging President Robert Mugabe in the forthcoming 2018 election, as an independent candidate.

The former banker — famed for publicly speaking out against attacks on businesses and factories by war veterans and later uncharacteristically resigning from Mugabe’s Cabinet about a year after his appointment — said there was need for a paradigm shift in the country’s politics.

He recently turned down two separate offers by the Dumiso Dabengwa-led Zapu and Zimbabwe People First (ZPF) to lead the opposition outfits.

“When you look at the facts on the ground and beyond just Zimbabwe like sub-Saharan Africa, you notice there is one thing common in all our countries, the government of the day runs the country for the party and not for the citizens,” Moyo told journalists here on the side-lines of National Youth Development Trust (NYDT) public debate on Wednesday.

“The government of the day runs the country for the benefit of party members as opposed to the benefit of all citizens,” he said.

“My view is that if I get involved in politics, I am going to run as an independent because when you think about it, what type of a president do you want? You want a president who has got responsibility and accepts responsibility for all citizens and not for some citizens.

“A president is a president of a country not of a party. He or she should be capable of being a president even for those who did not vote for him or her. We don’t seem to have that maturity,” Moyo said.

He said “my own view and conclusion is that for the time being, we need to try the idea of citizens being persuaded to vote for somebody who does not belong to a party.”

Moyo said he was “seriously considering standing as an independent candidate”.

On the other hand, Moyo explained why he resigned from Mugabe’s Cabinet, a move that saw the miffed leader describe him as lacking the qualities of a real man.

“There are now 16 years since I left the Cabinet. And when I left, most people don’t know that a day before, I spent about one and half hours with the president telling him I was resigning. The press said I resigned from South Africa, which is not true,” he said.

He further noted that he left because he was not prepared to be acculturated into the corrupt Zanu PF way of doing things.

“I left because I realised that what I believed in the rest of the team didn’t believe in. I left because I did not view my job as an opportunity to loot money. Because I didn’t believe that being a minister is about looting money but about serving the nation.”

Moyo said he was not a member of the ruling party when he was appointed minister, but was handpicked as a technocrat to give credence to the party’s economic policies. Daily News