Jonathan Moyo — here, there and everywhere.
Last month, I told a colleague that Brigadier-General Douglas Nyikayaramba’s statement that MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai did not pose a political threat, but a security threat was not couched in the military man’s language, but vintage Moyo-speak.
A fortnight ago, Moyo finally surfaced to append his name to an article in The Sunday Mail headlined “MDC-T threat to national security”.
When Moyo was fast-tracked back into Zanu PF top echelons, he was touted as a genius who would turn around the party’s fast-waning fortunes.
But all indications are that he has not made much, if any, headway. This week, he wrote a piece in The Sunday Mail titled “Private media gone to the dogs”, in which he straight away bore into “Trevor Ncube’s floundering Zimbabwe Independent” in an uncontrolled attack on the editor whom he described as a “high school dropout”, saying “he has a lot of skeletons in his dirty and smelly closet whose time to be let loose has come”. Moyo habitually goes straight for the jugular instead of building up his case in a calm and rational way.
This rancorous lashing-out could be due to frustration as his project to revive Zanu PF crumbles right before his eyes — and he is taking it out on the private media. Instead of making threats, he should admit that he was given — and accepted — an impossible task; in other words, he was set up to fail.
To start with, he is the public face of an increasingly unpopular regime. He is doomed to failure, whichever way he turns.
The “set-up-to-fail syndrome” is a known phenomenon whereby people get put into situations where it may appear on the face of it that they have a fair chance of success, yet the reality is that, no matter how talented they are, there is little real chance of succeeding because of strong factors militating against this.
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To begin with, there are serious divisions within Zanu PF itself over Moyo because of his flip-flopping tendencies.
As much as his patron — who appears to be President Robert Mugabe — may want to, you can’t build a one-person organisation and expect to succeed in the long run.
Moyo appears to be such an “organisation” as he surfaces from any angle to issue statements, attacking people from MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai to South African President Jacob Zuma, with the Zanu PF spokesperson, Foreign Affairs minister or Publicity minister nowhere to be seen and heard despite their official roles over those matters.
With so much turf wars, tweaking roles in favour of Moyo to the exclusion of others is going to meet with resistance at all levels.
Many in Zanu PF have never fully accepted him into their fold. That big element of distrust is still firmly there.
In this power play to “put Moyo in his place”, they could coalesce to create conditions for his failure.
He should have learnt this after his messy divorce from Zanu PF first time around when Mugabe described him as “akaoma musoro sedamba” (pig-headed).
Yes, the main cause is Moyo’s adamant refusal to admit that there has been systemic failure against all indications on the ground despite his undoubtedly incisive intellect.
In this day and age of Facebook and Twitter, preoccupation with Machiavellian politics is not a sustainable strategy as any manipulation is bound to be exposed sooner rather than later.
It’s no longer possible to harness and control information flow such as obtained pre-Facebook. The tide of uprisings in North Africa shows ground rules have changed.
Coupled with that, there is the delusions of grandeur some people suffer — thinking they can succeed where others have failed.
Moyo falls into this category. He implemented wholesale ruthless changes in the State media when he was Information minister, leaving ZBC on the deathbed and Zimpapers hobbling as he purged staff and micro-managed the organisations from his Munhumutapa Building offices in his crusade to revive Zanu PF’s waning popularity, literally scaring employees, as one critic of micro-management puts it, “into non-thinking androids”.
Micro-managing may work for a while, but in time, it acts as a brake on all progress.
New ideas are discouraged as the talent to create and move forward is imprisoned in the mind of one person — you! And, it is repressive! It’s not surprising that Moyo has reportedly sidled up to the military further muddying the political waters.
This week, Moyo wrote: “There is nothing in . . . any article by this writer which says that President Mugabe was by definition a threat to NATIONAL SECURITY . . .”
In April 2008, Moyo, in an article headlined “Mugabe can’t stomach defeat”, wrote after the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) withheld the March poll results: “. . . President Mugabe did not win the election and is now desperately trying to steal the result through an unjustified recount because he does not have any prospect of winning a run-off or a rerun.
The simple truth . . . is that Morgan Tsvangirai won . . . even if with less than the required absolute majority.
In other words, Tsvangirai got more votes than Mugabe and thus defeated him . . . the defeated Mugabe and his shocked hangers-on are using the delay to scheme up a dirty game plan whose nefarious purpose is to reverse Tsvangirai’s victory with the collusion of ZEC at all cost and by any means available.
This is being done under a barrage of confused and confusing Zanu PF talk around a recount, runoff or rerun when the result has not been announced.
In the circumstances, ZEC’s delay in announcing the result has become inherently destabilising to the detriment of both the national interest and NATIONAL SECURITY.”
And, was that “affectionate criticism” as Moyo claimed this week in trying to wriggle out of such venomous attacks on Mugabe? Anyone — ranging from a professor to a high school dropout – will conclude that Moyo “doth protest too much”.
That’s the danger of writing with reckless abandon, of being impulsive and impetuous – you end up lying. [email protected]
