I am "not destroying Zanu PF from within but reforming it" says Professor J Moyo - the mischievous Macavity!

Professor Jonathan Moyo set out to explain why he was not the one destroying Zanu PF from within as Mugabe and others have accused him of. He started by denying that he ever said that himself.

"It will be absolutely nonsensical for a person like me to say the best way of destroying Zanu-PF is from within," he said.

"That's a drunkard's statement, it's nonsense. It's a statement that can be said by some village pumpkin that has never come close to a classroom.”

He is such a clever and persuasive speaker with the gift of the gab. “Village pumpkin that has never come close to a classroom”; who can resist such flowery language! It is easy to see why he has left the uninitiated convinced right is wrong and wrong is right.

Of course it is not nonsense that one can destroy any organisation like Zanu PF from within; history is full of stories people who set out to do just that. When Absalom rose against his father King David, was it not one of the King’s agents who masterminded Absalom’s demise from within by giving the upstart the wrong advice?

"I don't need you to tell me the dangers of such a statement. I have never said that and will never, ever, no one will ever find anything like that from records,” continued the Professor. Not even a “village pumpkin” would make such a statement and expect to live what more a cunning fellow like you. So spare us the Tabasco sauce and all the glitz bull; if you are not trying to destroy Zanu PF from within, then what mischief – for mischief it has to be – are you up to?! 

“What I said was that the best way to reform Zanu-PF is from within,” said the Professor. "Now, if your uneducated mind translates reform as destruction, to hell with you. That is not my problem and I want to repeat that very statement that the best way to reform Zanu-PF is from within, come and join us."

The Minister was officiating at the Zimbabwe National Editors' Forum annual general meeting held in Harare and as far as I know there was no stampede to join Zanu PF, until not without understanding what Zanu PF reforms the Minister was talking about.

"We had a congress that reformed Zanu-PF," he said  "We have moved from electing our vice presidents and second secretaries and national chairman to have them appointed by the president so that we can have one centre of power.

"We reformed from multiple centres of power to one centre of power. That is reform. Do you think you can achieve that from outside Zanu-PF?"

For the last 15 years, at least, the nation has been clamouring for democratic change and free, fair and credible elections in which we all have a meaningful vote. Zanu PF itself has become a corrupt and tyrannical dictatorship in which all power was concentrated in the hands of one man – Mugabe. Many people believe Zanu PF has become so autocratic it was beyond reforming; it should just be buried politically.

Professor Moyo’s reforms have just taken away the little electoral powers that Zanu PF members still had let and given them to Mugabe. The party members have, on paper at least, the power to elect the party’s first secretary but since no one else has ever dared put challenge Mugabe for the post – Mugabe has seen to it that nobody did – there was never been an votes cast on the matter ever since Mugabe took that post.

Another one of last year’s Zanu PF reforms has allowed Mugabe to force elected provincial chairpersons to be forced out of office in mob-rule type vote-of-no-confidence so that only those supportive of Mugabe’s political agenda were elected into the central committee.

In short, Mugabe has even more tyrannical powers than ever before.

I used to admire Professor Jonathan Moyo from his writings in the Financial Gazette, the pink paper, in the 1980s. I thought him a great intellectual, a thinker, the man destined to leave an indelible mark on in Zimbabwe’s history. He has done that alright but alas not the positive mark I had imagined. 

What I did not know then but know now is that he is not the clever intellectual I thought him to be but just a very articulate demagogue, a devilish imp who would sell his own mother for whatever he can get and be proud he had a mother to sell. In short, he is not a bless to the nation but a curse!

Yes one can now say with confidence, for we now have the benefit of the accumulated volumes of data to prove it, that Professor Jonathan Moyo must be THE MACAVITY: THE MYSTERY CAT of Zimbabwe politic. T S Eliot imagined the character; we have the real flesh and blood, with a soul to be damned, Macavity, the Hidden Paw.

President Mugabe called Professor Moyo the “devil incarnate”, “the weevil” who was “destroying Zanu PF from within”. The tyrant is 100% right and yet he is also 100% wrong; there lies the mystery - the oriental, mesmerising, hypnotic, dazzling, confusing mystic Professor Jonathan Moyo. That is why those who think they know him find to their confusion and horror, as Mugabe did, that they are 100% right and 100% wrong! Of course, that is why he is the Macavity of Zimbabwe politics.

Mugabe was correct to say Moyo is the “devil incarnate”, the man has a calculating devilish mind that the lord of the underworld will be rightly proud of, so the tyrant gets 100% there. When Mugabe got it 100% wrong was in saying Moyo was destroying Zanu PF from within; it was Moyo’s calculating devilish mind that produced the master plan that save Zanu PF from political annihilation in the 2000 and 2002 elections. The Hidden Paw has himself public boosted of how he saved Zanu PF from being politically buried and Mugabe thanked Moyo by appointing him Minister of Information.

When Mugabe once again stood on the edge and looked into the depths of political abyss in the upcoming 2013, he once again turned to Macavity to save him. Although Moyo was the brains behind the failed Tsholotsho palace coup of 2005 to force Mugabe out of power, still Mugabe was prepared to overlook that and get the “devil incarnate” back on his team. Mugabe and Zanu PF “won” the 2013 elections, Moyo got his old job back and the rest is history.

It was at funeral of the late Nathan Shamuyarira’s funeral, himself a former Minister of Information, in July 2014 that Mugabe accused Moyo of being the weevil destroying Zanu PF from within. Mugabe was ranting and fuming against Moyo for allowing the public media journalists to print stories of corruption in high places - Mugabe’s own spokesman, George Charamba was named in the salary scandal at Public Service Medical Aid Society (PSMAS). Simpleton like Didymus Mutasa were convinced that Jonathan Moyo was toast hence his offering to apply the Gamatox insecticide on the “weevil”.

Poor Didymus Mutasa he dared cross-swords with the “Mystery Cat”, “the bafflement of Scotland Yard”! He was warned that Moyo will have the last laugh on the gamatox jab and so it has come to pass. In less than six months of Mutasa retrieving the Gamatox from the Museum archives – no one makes this stuff anymore because it killed weevils, rats, everything including humans -  he found himself plastered from head to toe in Gamatox. We all know this was the handwork of Macavity but he will tell he was in Tsholotsho and not Manicaland the scene of the crime!

Moyo met Mugabe two days after the funeral and the two must have kissed and made up, in their own devilish way, because the fire-breathing dragon at the funeral was reduced to a harmless innocent lamb. It is child’s play to guess what happened. Moyo must have reminded our dragon that he has all the details of exactly how the 2013 elections were rigged – after all he is the one who masterminded it – and if any was to happen to him or another stupid outburst about him then those details will be released for the whole world to see.

T S Eliot’s Macavity what never at the scene of the crime, “always has an alibi, and one or two to spare”. Professor Moyo has not bothered with all that and gone for the jugular vein – he has the tyrant by the balls.

Zimbabwe could well have got rid of Mugabe and this Zanu PF dictatorship as far back as 2 000 but that was not to be. Yes Tsvangirai and his MDC fiends’ corrupt and breath-taking incompetence have played their sickening role in this national tragedy. But the single individual who will go down in Zimbabwe history as the “devil incarnate” to have saved Mugabe and Zanu PF from political oblivion and to “reform” the tyrannical regime from bad to worse is Professor Jonathan Moyo, the T S Eliot’s Macavity of Zimbabwe politics.