"Zimbabwe is doomed because of failure of speech" admits Professor Moyo

For someone who had become hooked on absolute power and the attendant influence and wealth it brought, sudden loss of all that was a hammer blow to anyone. A few months after the November 2017 coup, Mugabe told an AU representative how miserable he and his family were, especially his Grace to whom the lose of First Lady title had send her into perpetual mourning. 

Actually, the Mugabe’s had good cause to be contend. Yes, they lost the absolute power and the attendant influence but they had their looted wealth, the Blue Roof mansion, farms, vast business empire and their extravagant lifestyle was guaranteed, thanks to the very generous golden handshake and retirement package Mnangagwa gave them. 

Other victims of the November 2017 coup like Professor Jonathan Moyo, long serving former Zanu PF minister and Mugabe’s self-appointed chief strategist, were not so lucky. He lost the absolute power, the influence, the wealth and his freedom. 

Professor Moyo was lucky to escape with his life and has spend the last year holed up in exile. From there, he has send out tweets and articles from time to time. The year of isolation, particularly for such an egotistic individual like him, has taken its heavy toll; there is evidence, in his recent article, to suggest the man is now paranoid schizophrenic. 

“Paranoid schizophrenia is the most common type of  schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is defined as “a chronic mental disorder in which a person loses touch with reality (psychosis)," according to Wikipedia.

Professor Moyo has certainly lost touch with reality!

“Last week on November 24 Emmerson Mnangagwa was in Murombedzi - former president Robert Mugabe's village backyard in Mashonaland West - to commemorate his chequered one year in office following his controversial installation as president on November 24, 2017 after the army unconstitutionally ousted Mugabe,” wrote Professor Moyo in Bulawayo 24.

“The Murombedzi commemoration, also attended by (Retired) General Constantino Chiwenga, who led the November 2017 military coup, was understandably disguised as Mnangagwa's "thank you rally" for his disputed election on July 30, 2018, which has left him paralysed by a crisis of legitimacy.

“This is because the military coup, which just about everyone now says was unconstitutional, has become a dirty word among a growing number of Zimbabweans whose livelihoods have been dramatically eroded over the last 12 months, and are worse off today than they were before the coup as a crippling economic meltdown becomes the order of the day.”

The year spent holed-up in some fox-hole is certainly playing dirty tricks on Professor Moyo’s mind because:

1. whilst Mnangagwa has a serious legitimacy problem it is not arising from last November’s coup; it is rising from the failure to hold free, fair and credible elections. Mnangagwa rigged the 30 th July 2018 elections just as Zanu PF had rigged other past elections. Mnangagwa is just as illegitimate as Mugabe before him and so last November’s coup was only removing an illegitimate tyrant hence the reason why the world was not particularly concerned. 

1. the crippling economic meltdown has got worse in the last year but root dates back to 1980 and it is the 37 years of gross mismanagement and rampant corruption under Mugabe leadership that landed the country into this mess to suggest that it was all Mnangagwa’s doing is nonsense.   

To be fair to Professor Moyo, he had his good moments of insightful comprehension. 

“A cursory review of public discourse in Zimbabwe will readily show that the questions of the "what" and "why" of politics in the country are hardly, if ever, asked, let alone answered. This is because they invariably require the identification of "who" has done "what", "how", "where" and "when". That identification requires truth-telling which always attracts ghastly consequences on the truth-teller,” he wrote.

“It is against this backdrop that the challenge for the media and academia in Zimbabwe, and indeed for ordinary Zimbabweans, is that they are not able to freely and meaningfully discuss and debate things to tell the truth about things that have been done or are being done by the country's leadership. A major reason why the claim of a new dispensation after the military coup has proven to be false is that the non-discussability of things that have happened, or are happening, has remained to be the scourge of politics in Zimbabwe since 1980. Nothing has changed.

“In her critically acclaimed treatise, the Human Condition, Hannah Arendt decries as a "failure of speech" where human beings find themselves unable to discuss, or to reflect on, things that are nevertheless done in their society. Such a condition is totalitarian because "speech" is a sine qua non of human existence. It is in this connection that freedom of expression is both a natural and constitutional right, because speech is an innate human quality that gives rise to an inalienable right. The populist historian, Yuval Harari, catalogues in his book — Sapiens — how "speech" has superbly distinguished human beings from other species by enabling them to cooperate flexibly in large numbers to accomplish complex tasks to benefit humanity.

“The essence of human freedom is thus the discussion of human action, namely, truth-telling. A society that does not discuss what is happening or has happened within its borders is uncivilised, undemocratic, primitive and doomed. Yet this is where Zimbabwe finds itself, one year after the military coup that Zimbabweans from across the political divide at home and in the Diaspora celebrated in their numbers as a "liberation moment" on November 18, 2017.”

There are four things well worth noting from Professor Moyo’s moments of sanity (ignore his obsession with seeing the coup as the moment of madness):

1. As Mugabe’s Minister of Information and Zanu PF’s greatest propagandist and strategist Professor Moyo has done done the greatest harm in destroying freedom of expression and free press and stifled meaningful debate and democratic discourse in Zimbabwe than anyone else. 

1. It is curious that it is only now that Professor Moyo acknowledges that by stifling meaningful dialogue and truth-telling Zanu PF condemned this nation to be “uncivilised, undemocratic, primitive and doomed”; which is exactly what has happened. He admits it now when he has lost the absolute power and influence to stop the rot! 

1. There is no denying that the de facto one-party Zanu PF dictatorship has been a curse to this nation, Zimbabwe is a broken nation. Indeed, identifying and acknowledging the evil of the dictatorship, which is exactly what Moyo is doing here, is a key first step in the search for a cure. 

1. The second step is acknowledging that dismantling the dictatorships will be the greatest challenge of all; it tough to build, it is easier to destroy than to built and rebuilding is the toughest of all, worse still when one has to fight those already enjoying absolute power like Mnangagwa and his junta determined to retain the dictatorship at all cost! 

38 years and counting of corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF rule has frog matched this nation to the edge of the precipice. Last November’s military coup has been but a pose to boot out some of the leaders and whatever minuscule difference this has made to the course and speed is of no material difference. What matters is Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown has forced 75% of the population to live on US$1.00 or less a day is socially, morally and politically unsustainable. We are sitting on a ticking time bomb!

The only way to defuse Zimbabwe’s economic time bomb is for Zanu PF to step down to allow the nation to finally dismantle the Zanu PF dictatorship at the heart of the corrupt and tyrannical misrule. Time is not on our side!