Professor Jonathan Moyo, Information Minister Plenipotentiary in the government of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, is sometimes capable of making a surprisingly lucid statement in the face of rabid questioning from the world’s gutter press.
Popping up unexpectedly at the Commonwealth leaders’
shindig at Coolum in Australia last weekend, he made short shrift of telling the press, and the world at large, exactly where to get off. Why, he asked, did Zimbabwe have to be subjected to roving bands of interfering, foreign election observers when the British electoral system was not subjected to the same kind of scrutiny?
He had a point. Just because Britain prides itself in being the Mother of Parliaments, it does not mean that its electoral system is necessarily the epitome of true democratic governance. The government of the day usually wins, and then maintains itself in power for another five years through a consistent campaign of lies, half-truths and brazen seduction of soft-headed voters whose world view is defined by television shows like Coronation Street. Why should Zimbabwe be any different?
This technique of answering a question with a counter question to which there is no answer presses all the right populist buttons back home in Africa. Countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe do have a pressing problem of inequitable land distribution based on a legacy of racial inequality. The fact that the Zimbabwean government is belatedly trying to right these wrongs by foul means or fair is neither here nor there. In any case, the emotive issue of land redistribution is a sure-fire vote catcher among the unsophisticated rural poor. (But let’s face it, a leg up from landless peasant to struggling kulak would be appealing in any society.)
Land is the thing. Not even British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s legendary gay gangsters could be expected to oppose the right of the dispossessed and previously disenfranchised black masses to return to the land that was savagely taken from them by the likes of the late Cecil John Rhodes ? an icon of Britain’s imperial legacy, if ever there was one.
Interesting, then, that one of the latest beneficiaries of Mugabe’s compulsory land seizure policy appears to be none other than one Jonathan Moyo, Minister of Information. In a list of struggle veterans who have been allocated farmland expropriated from unproductive settlers, his name appears among those who have been granted land in the eastern highland district of Little Connemara. The watchword of the new landowner will presumably be “Mealies for All”.
The strange thing is that Little Connemara sits among the staggeringly beautiful Nyanga mountains of eastern Zimbabwe. There are endless scenic vistas, forests of towering pines and bracing mountain streams, making it a key tourist destination, and a resort area for the black nouveau riche of Harare to rub shoulders with old, white, settler money.
Plots are seldom larger than an acre. The only farms that are likely to be seen there are trout farms dotted along the region’s system of artificial dams, fulfilling an insatiable (and elitist) hunger for sport fishing. There are also breeding farms for Rhodesian ridgeback dogs. Mealies for the masses? Forget it.
Moyo’s stock response would probably be, “So what? Land is land. Repossession is repossession. Who is to say those mountains did not belong to my ancestors, anyway?” En daar lê die ding.
This bellicose, simplistic language sits well in the mouths of ex-combatants, the men and women who did actually risk sacrificing their lives during the chimurenga that brought Zimbabwe to the threshold of independence, and a possible mood of reconciliation between its black and white citizens.
But Moyo is no dreadlocked, war-crazed veteran who still goes to bed in his boots. He is a sleekly groomed, UCLA-trained political scientist of impeccable academic credentials, who was also a fiercely articulate critic of the Mugabe regime in the pages of one of Zimbabwe’s leading literary/political magazines during his tenure as head of his department at the University of Zimbabwe.
But shit happens. The trail is hard to follow, but it seems that Moyo’s transformation from urbane, meticulous intellectual to petulant, ultra-nationalist furioso began with personal, possibly financial, problems in the mid-1990s.
The trail of bitterness led him to unceremoniously decamp from his position at the university and take up a post as field officer for the Ford Foundation in Nairobi. There he cooked up a series of fantastical research projects for which millions of dollars were secured by the American foundation, many of which were never to be seen or heard of again. There was also no concrete, auditable outcome to the project.
Before the bloodhounds were set on him, Moyo jumped ship once again, securing a position as associate professor of political science at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg on the strength of a research project generated during his catastrophic Ford years, but here dished up as a brand new wheeze, which fooled us all.
As has been widely reported, this project generated even greater revenues, large sums of which the professor managed, by a combination of sly misinformation and hysterical abuse, to get funnelled into his own pocket, without too much intervention from the Wits administration. Again, there was no discernible outcome to this grandiose, African- renaissance-style project.
And then, when the bloodhounds began to appear on the horizon once more, he managed to slip back across the Limpopo, ultimately to reappear in the guise of chief spin doctor to his old enemy, Mugabe.
Moyo’s actions over the past few years have certainly guaranteed that his academic career is permanently dead in the water. He seems to have pitched his tent instead on the treacherous ground of Third World politics, for reasons that are not entirely clear. He is a paper populist with no discernible constituency, his position entirely dependent on the protection of the Chief.
Is he an African enigma, a Janus-faced reactionary whose zig-zag career proves the dictum that you can take the boy out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the boy?
I don’t think so. I think that Moyo, like Bill Clinton, is simply a thoroughly modern political animal who lives by the motto that power, rather than virtue, is its own reward.
Where he surfaces after the turmoil of the forthcoming election will be interesting to see.
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