As Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo made his reputation as the architect of the government’s campaign to silence criticism, and still had time to get his own revolutionary jingles aired on state television.
Though he quickly fell from grace after challenging the president’s authority, he left behind his legacy of laws that effectively deny government critics a means of disseminating information.
Moyo, a former academic, had evolved from a sharp critic of President Robert Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party to driving force in Mugabe’s government. But he was fired over the weekend after he defied Zanu-PF rules by putting himself forward as an independent candidate in parliamentary elections scheduled for March 31.
Zanu-PF disqualified Moyo and other dissenters within the party from contesting the election and they were forbidden from standing as independents after they became involved in an internal power struggle in November.
Moyo may be gone, but Zimbabwe remains what the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international press freedom watchdog, calls one of the 10 worst countries for a journalist.
Moyo’s Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, passed in 2002, was used to shut down the country’s only independent daily newspaper, The Daily News. The laws also were used to jail independent Zimbabwean journalists and expel or bar foreign journalists.
Moyo also shut down two independent radio stations.
Moyo controlled the government’s television and radio broadcaster. He cancelled its contracts for news supplied by the British Broadcasting Corporation and the United States CNN network.
He fired several broadcast presenters and largely banished Western music and movies from the airwaves. An amateur musician, he ordered the broadcaster to run jingles he composed and revolutionary songs praising the often-violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms.
Human rights groups and the independent Mass Media Monitoring Project of Zimbabwe said much of the propaganda broadcast on Moyo’s orders and carried in the state press incited hatred and prejudice against government critics, the main opposition party, the 30 000-member white community and other minorities in the nation’s population of 12,5-million.
The media monitoring group likened the ”hate” messages to incitement by Hutu militants ahead of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
A day after Moyo described The Daily News as a threat to national security, the paper’s printing presses in southern Harare were destroyed in a bomb attack.
Military explosives were used. There have been no arrests in that attack. Reporters at state newspapers said Moyo frequently personally supervised the selection of material for publication and wrote outspoken pro-government columns himself or assigned loyalists to write them.
As minister, he arranged virtually round-the-clock monitoring of the internet and satellite television to amass files on journalists reporting on the country for foreign media.
Before joining the government, Moyo taught at the main University of Zimbabwe in Harare in the 1980s. Then, he contributed highly critical articles to independent newspapers and magazines, accusing Mugabe’s party of being authoritarian, outdated in its avowed Marxist policies and misguided in its alliances with China, the Soviet Union and bankrupt East bloc nations.
But he joined the government in 2000 as the chief spokesperson for the state-appointed Constitutional Commission ahead of a referendum on constitutional reforms that would have entrenched Mugabe’s powers. In Mugabe’s biggest polling defeat since he led the nation to independence in 1980, referendum voters rejected the reforms.
Moyo, however, made himself a fiery and sometimes eloquent defender of Mugabe and his policies and was appointed Information Minister a few months later.
Moyo’s downfall began in November when he convened a meeting to oppose Mugabe’s choice of Joyce Mujuru as the first woman Vice-President after the death in 2003 of Mugabe’s longtime aide and ally, Vice-President Simon Muzenda at age 80.
Moyo was reprimanded by the ruling party and dropped from the 50-member politburo, its top policy-making body, and its 250 member central committee.
Six of the party’s 10 provincial chairmen invited to the meeting by Moyo were suspended from the party for five years for favouring Parliament speaker Emmerson Mnangagwa for the vice-presidency, a post that could put him in line to succeed Mugabe, 81.
The power wrangle over the vice-presidency, fueled by Moyo, was the biggest split in the party since 1980. – Sapa-AP