Moyo hangs on by a slender thread
December 24, 2004
Peta Thornycroft, in Harare, takes a look at the career and prospects of the man known to his opponents as Mugabe's Goebbels.
Zimbabwe's information minister, Jonathan Moyo, isn't taking calls. On Monday morning he wasn't at his office either.
His permanent secretary, George Charamba, who often contributed to various vitriolic and sometimes incomprehensible newspaper columns written by Moyo, has quickly distanced himself from his disgraced boss.
While Moyo was out doing whatever he is doing these days, Charamba was at a party at the president's official residence, State House, according to his secretary - so he seems to have survived the purge that caught his boss.
Moyo turned up for probably the last parliamentary session before elections on Monday afternoon, looking downhearted and isolated.
It is generally agreed that Moyo's "crime" was to cross his boss.
He organised an "unauthorised" meeting to oppose the appointment of Joyce Mujuru as a vice-president instead of his preferred candidate, Emmerson Mnangagwa, once tipped by the media, and himself, to be Mugabe's successor.
Moyo rallied six provincial chairmen to his cause and did it without the Central Intelligence Organisation finding out and ratting on him to the presidency.
Mugabe clearly discovered only at the last minute that his own plan to prevent Mnangagwa becoming a vice president was in jeopardy.
Moyo is enough of a power player to know that crossing Mugabe is a fatal error. For the record, though, did he do wrong in terms of objective party rules? (as if that counts.)
According to political analyst Brian Kagoro, Moyo did indeed transgress the Zanu-PF constitution either as it stands, or as it will be when the latest amendments are finalised.
"Any meeting of more than three people would be seen by Zanu-PF as unauthorised, and Jonathan should have known that," Kagoro said.
Where does this all leave the great opportunist, who until five years ago was one of Mugabe's sharpest critics?
Can he perform another somersault and land on his feet?
On the face of it, one would think not. Moyo's political and financial prospects look bleak inside Zimbabwe and elsewhere.
What about becoming an ordinary MP?
He put time and money - whose money is no longer considered critical in Zimbabwe these days - into his home village, Tsholotsho, in Matabeleland, and the constituency he hoped to win.
By all accounts, some aspects of life in Tsholotsho did improve.
So, in a fair primary election, Moyo could well be Zanu-PF's candidate there for next year's parliamentary elections.
But Zanu-PF could easily block that if it chose. It says it will not allow anyone to stand for it in the March parliamentary elections unless they have been a party member for at least five years.
As a Johnny come lately, and presuming he joined the party when he began his public association with Zanu-PF in late 1999, Moyo would be too new to qualify.
Mugabe can, and does, appoint unelected ministers, which is how Moyo got his present cabinet post in 2000.
Mugabe has indicated that he will in future only appoint ministers from the ranks of elected parliamentarians.
But that may not be set in stone.
Moyo may have been dropped from the Zanu-PF central committee and was therefore automatically excluded from the politburo, but he hasn't yet been sacked from the cabinet.
With a general election only three months away, that is largely irrelevant.
But will Mugabe bring him back after the election?
He ought to because he owes Moyo, but ought means little to
Mugabe and Zanu-PF.
He ought to because Moyo sold Mugabe's chaotic land grab in the most important constituency, Africa, most of which sucked up his every word, not only about how it was correcting genuine historical injustices, but even that it was legal, constitutional and a roaring success.
He arranged field visits for African visitors and selected journalists to see carefully chosen farms.
He entertained them lavishly at the most expensive and popular restaurant in Harare, and engaged them with the full blast of his considerable charm.
"Zanu-PF owes him," says Kagoro.
"He delivered the top prize, he got the hugely popular Daily News off the streets and crafted new media legislation, the
Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act which delivered journalists to Harare Central Police Station in record numbers.
"He got every journalist without a Zimbabwe passport out of the country and changed the political lexicon to include the blame and fear mantras of "Tony Blair" and "sovereignty".
His cabinet colleagues, some of whom loathed him, nevertheless applauded his achievements and joined in attacks on political enemies he helped create.
In the process he also helped himself, of course.
And even though most of his cabinet colleagues - the army chiefs and most of the judiciary - did the same, this might yet prove his downfall.
It may well thwart any ambition he may harbour to be just a country squire.
His big prize in Dete, Matabeleland, was a huge conservancy on which stands the famed tourist attraction, Sikumi Tree Lodge. But since Moyo's fall from grace, the property has been seized by the state, and his cousin, who Moyo claimed was the real "beneficiary", has withdrawn from the property.
His second grab of agricultural real estate was Patterson, a 500ha farm previously used for grazing in the Mazowe Valley 15km west of Harare, which he says he "bought" for about Z$6-million, or then about about R7 000.
The owner of the land, Tom Baily, who still has the title deeds, never sold it as he and his old parents were forcibly removed from their homes in the same way as most of their commercial-farming colleagues.
Moyo has done well on Patterson compared to most of his cabinet colleagues. He grew a good soya bean crop last winter and has erected a large shed, and the entrance to the property is permanently guarded.
He planned to build a dam. Again, where the money came from for capital inputs, ploughing, wages, etc, is one of those unfathomable Zimbabwean mysteries. But before Easter he earned the ire of another powerful figure, Reserve Bank Governor Gideon Gono, for disrupting Kondozi, one of the most successful vegetable export farms - and therefore foreign currency earners - in Africa.
So his shares were low even before his fatal political gaffe.
Perhaps Gono will now ask awkward questions about where the money came from to farm Patterson.
Does journalism then offer prospects? It would seem not.
Moyo's new newspaper the Southern Times, a joint venture with his
information counterpart in Namibia, to counter the influence of the hated "apartheid" press in Southern Africa, is not selling.
Last Sunday street vendors said they didn't get a delivery but had
previously received three copies and sent back two or three.
There is speculation, and so far that's all it is, that Mugabe will fob him off with an ambassadorship.
The joke among his many enemies is that he will get North Korea.
Others suggest more realistically that Mugabe needs a more strident voice at the United Nations, which would put Moyo back into a world he likes, but a world which may have tired of him.
What about academia?
His old employer, the University of Zimbabwe, is largely a Zanu-PF-controlled institution, and might be nervous about taking him back after his fall from grace.
And, anyway, the salary they would offer would be far too low to support him in the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed - a lifestyle that includes sending his children to private school and living in an official residence.
What about South Africa? The University of the Witwatersrand would almost certainly not want him back after he allegedly ran off with more than R1-million of donor funds for a project he never delivered when he was on their staff before moving into his current role.
He couldn't have made much from his unkempt Saxonwold house either when it was sold earlier this year.
The international community of non-governmental organisations knows he is accused of running foul of financial probity at the Ford Foundation in Kenya.
He is, and will long remain, unable to get a visa to visit the United States, where he studied and still has friends, or Europe, because of their travel bans on Mugabe and his cronies.
Kagoro suggests that the many enemies Moyo has made as Mugabe's propaganda hitman may turn on him now that he is down.
They include high-up figures inside Zanu-PF.
"There are many people he defamed since he became minister. They have been too frightened of his power to sue him up to now. The suits could run into billions," said Kagoro.
"Jonathan is in trouble. Never forget, Zanu-PF is a spiteful party and any investigation into the information ministry's finances may be difficult for him."
So it seems Moyo has indeed burnt his bridges all over Zimbabwe and the world, and his future now hangs by that most slender of threads - the mercy of his boss, Mugabe.
Moyo did him a world of favours and made only one mistake, but it was, of course, the worst one - getting caught with his fingers in Mugabe's pie.
Which of these two will weigh more heavily in Mugabe's mind? His track record is not encouraging, for Moyo.
We in the media cannot be expected to feel much sympathy for his plight.
But - digging deep for impartiality - the few foreign correspondents who have survived his purges will miss his occasionally perspicacious descriptions of ourselves in his columns.
And it was cool, for a while, being the "running dogs of imperialism".
