Michael Hartnack
Zimbabwe’s in-your-face Department of Information was at it again last week, fulminating on everything from first lady Grace Mugabe’s right to keep secret her abysmal London University law exam results, to the alleged conspiracy of whites behind South Africa’s planned deportation of Zimbabwean farm workers.
Playing the race card, an unnamed “authoritative source” told the state-controlled Herald newspaper the deportations would rouse black Zimbabweans’ fury against South Africa, and whites in general.
The voice was unmistakably that of Professor Jonathan Moyo (47), President Robert Mugabe’s highly articulate Minister of State for Information.
A recent report in the Bulawayo Chronicle – another newspaper under Moyo’s control – said his “mesmerising glamour made him by far the most popular politician in Matabeleland since the death of vice-president Joshua Nkomo”.
Publication of unctious claims that adoring fans were fighting to shake Moyo’s hand clearly implied the paper’s master now nurses the highest ambitions.
Moyo declares that “the days of trash journalism are numbered” with a “Freedom of Information Act”, long delayed in drafting.
It may also signal the end of the road for Zimbabwe’s once-vibrant independent media, through imposition of a state-drafted “code of ethics”, an official accreditation system and a Moyo-nominated disciplinary board.
Several foreign correspondents have been ordered out of Zimbabwe this year.
Within hours of his promising to silence the Daily News in January, its presses were bombed.
In a land racked by political paranoia, Moyo is feared and hated both by opponents of the regime and old timers in Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF who see him as a Johnny-come-lately who whizzed up the ladder into the Cabinet and Politburo in the short space of two years. Before then, Moyo enjoyed international respect as a champion of human rights against Mugabe’s autocratic regime.
His bald, dome-like cranium, resembling one of the granite hills of the Matopos, has become a familiar sight on television and in opposition cartoons.
Moyo’s former colleagues fear being quoted about him. He rebuffs interviews by independent journalists.
Even Moyo’s origins are obscure. Without clarifying exactly where he was born, he recently denied a claim he hailed from the Nyamandhlovu area of Matabeleland, close to the Botswana border and scene of some of the worst atrocities against suspected Mugabe opponents during the 1980s.
Old colleagues believe he comes from Gwanda, south of Bulawayo, from a family linked to the Karanga section of Zimbabwe’s majority Shona people, rather than from the Ndebele minority. He attended a church school in Matabeleland, then the paper trail gets cloudy again.
Wilfred Mhanda, veteran of the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, claims Moyo enlisted as a young guerrilla in 1974 but deserted from a training camp in Tanzania within weeks and fled to the United States. Moyo says this is false, he was a mere child at the time.
He did, however, receive tertiary education in the US in the dying years of the Rhodesian War and the turbulent early years of independence, returning home with a doctorate of philosophy in political science, to join the University of Zimbabwe department of political and administrative studies.
It was there, between 1987 and 1991, that he won acclaim as a scholarly opponent of Mugabe’s plans for a one-party state.
His book on the 1990 election, Voting for Democracy, remains a classic critique of Zanu-PF skulduggery. He concluded it was essential to win proportional representation, a free press and legislated safeguards leading to truly “free-and-fair” polls.
“Why do we have a unicameral Parliament full of presidential appointees who do not appear capable of independent thinking?” he thundered in a 1991 article. Ten years later, Moyo is a presidential appointee and the question is unanswered.
He attacked Mugabe’s early threats to seize white farms and redistribute them to black Zimbabweans. “From the point of view of the landless … the measures are too good to be true,” Moyo said of Mugabe’s Land Acquisition Act. “This puts Zanu-PF as a ruling party at the risk of committing ‘politicide’ by promising what it can hardly deliver.
“The new land reform measures have the trappings of a boomerang – they dare the government to do something drastic when all indications are that there is neither the will nor the space for such action.”
Mugabe could never give all 10-million black Zimbabweans a viable plot, even if he seized every square metre owned by whites, Moyo warned.
Ten years later, with 76% of Zimbabwe’s now 13-million people living below the bread line, his point seems equally pertinent. What changed, or who changed?
Former colleagues believe Moyo turned cynical after a move to Kenya with the Ford Foundation in the mid-1990s. A 1999 article published in Zimbabwe indicated a change in tone – still attacking Mugabe, but urging him to strip whites of economic power and deliver “real independence”.
He became embroiled in a row with the Ford Foundation that has left the threat of litigation hanging over him. A similar but briefer excursion to Wits University led to another row over the fate of funds. He denies wrongdoing, but enemies accuse Moyo of scuttling to Mugabe’s side to seek legal protection.
However, when he agreed in 1999 to serve on a constitutional review commission, chaired by Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, his participation was generally felt to give it credibility.
Over the following six months, as the commission defied popular opinion to impose a framework that would have entrenched Mugabe’s power indefinitely, Moyo’s formerly urbane tone became increasingly embittered.
He blamed whites for the Constitution’s rejection at the February 2000 referendum. He was rewarded with a seat in Parliament and the Cabinet after the June 2000 general election.
Revealing for the first time a streak of vindictiveness, Moyo said urban voters who backed Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) would be “given a bitter pill” while Zanu-PF rewarded the “loyal and disciplined” rural areas.
Shortly afterwards – to the horror of party stalwarts – Mugabe brought Moyo into the Politburo.
The former champion of civil society continues to slang off any critic of the government’s human rights record and alleges it is those widely seen as victims, the MDC and the white farmers, who provoked violence in which 100 have died.
Many believe the recent adulatory articles in the Bulawayo Chronicle indicate Moyo’s ambition to become Mugabe’s vice-president when 70-year-old Joseph Msika steps down.
And after that?