Zanu PF might need Jonathan Moyo, but do you?

While Jonathan Moyo believes his vitriolic attacks on each and every person who ever found fault with Zanu PF policies have at last demolished all opposition, his actual achievement has been to demonstrate his and his party’s complete contempt for the citizens of Zimbabwe.

Almost every line of his Sunday Mail piece on October 4 displays his belief that each and every reader is far too thick to see through his lies and deceit. The facts that the people do know and understand are that it is Jonathan Moyo who is guilty of treachery and it is Jonathan Moyo who is employing every means possible to ensure that the MDC’s best efforts to help restore economic growth will be brought to nothing.

We are all perfectly aware that only the Zanu PF chefs feel threatened by the possibility of economic recovery. Jonathan Moyo has been drawn back into the Zanu PF ranks to make sure that the recovery does not happen. Why? Mainly to prevent the possibility that MDC will be credited for any such success, but also because the increasing prosperity of the Zimbabwean population would make it harder for Zanu PF to continue suppressing us.

Jonathan Moyo treachery has now been made manifest at many different levels. He persuaded the voters in Tsholotsho to elect him as their representative on the basis of his having completely rejected the Zanu PF’s “unprincipled” policies. Now he insults them by claiming that, having rejoined Zanu PF, he still represents them. He does not, any more than he represents the casualties of Gukurahundi whose unmarked graves are still scattered throughout the constituency.

Jonathan Moyo represents nobody but himself. His objective has been to re-qualify for a place on the gravy train, whatever the cost. On that issue of cost, we might argue that it has been at the cost of his integrity, but that presupposes that he had any in the first place. The evidence suggests that, in keeping with Zanu PF policies in general, the costs always fall on the shoulders of their victims, and their victims amount to absolutely everyone who is not riding in the gravy train.

Does that mean that the lower-ranking Zanu PF members are victims too? You can bet your life that they are. They might today be offered impunity and a few crumbs, but they are actively engaged in destroying their own futures. And Zanu PF has re-engaged clever Jonathan Moyo to help make them feel happy about it – for now.

But as Zanu PF’s major policy objective is to completely prevent the empowerment of everybody but the very small leadership clique, all others will in due course find themselves dumped and betrayed. By then, the more perceptive of them will be keenly aware that, with Jonathan Moyo’s help, they caused their own profound impoverishment.

Jonathan Moyo appears to rely on the fact that very few people have the patience or stamina to challenge his accusations. He achieves this effect by filling his lines with so many inaccurate or patently dishonest claims that rebuttals would be far to tedious to write and even more tedious to read. But Jonathan Moyo should not believe that the near-absence of objections means that people have been taken in or, worse, that therefore his outrageous claims must be true.

When, in his October 4 Sunday Mail article, Jonathan Moyo accuses Minister Tendai Biti of being on a “misguided journey towards collapsing the Zimbabwe economy”, Jonathan Moyo clearly hopes that his readers will immediately forget that the economy had already collapsed by the time Minister Biti was sworn into office and the people who had caused the collapse were the very ones who Jonathan Moyo so claims to so greatly admire.

But does Jonathan Moyo really admire them? He claims in his October 11 Sunday Mail piece that he “did not give as much time to appreciating and addressing the moral and political sensibilities” of Zanu PF’s senior leaders as he gave to “trying to get things done out there”, but he is actually appreciating the fact that they alone dish out tickets to ride on the gravy train. When he was campaigning for his Tsholotsho seat, Jonathan Moyo’s comments on the morals of these same individuals were anything but complimentary.

Of particular interest is Jonathan Moyo’s eagerness to pretend that fables invented and reproduced by The Herald and its sister papers can be used as evidence against Minister Biti and the MDC. The broad Zimbabwean population now instinctively disbelieves the Zanu PF Press, but many have noted, with wry amusement, how much more unbelievable these newspapers, radio and TV have become since Jonathan Moyo returned to the nefarious fold.

So the population is not taken in by claims that Minister Biti is “blocking the use of US$510 million from the IMF” or that he has blocked “lines of credit from Afreximbank and PTA Bank totalling some US$800 million”. Almost nobody has any difficulty relating to Minister Biti’s determination to remain fully accountable to the electorate, and this first demands that he prevents these sums from being hijacked by the Zanu PF patronage disbursal system.

A recurring theme in Jonathan Moyo’s psychotic ramblings is his complaints about “regime change” motives and agendas and his use of words like treasonous and sinister show that he is now very much against it. That is another change since his Tsholotsho campaign.

But his determination to persuade all of us that hopes for regime change amount to treason might be the biggest insult of all. Clearly, he believes that we should all feel honoured to be abused by Zanu PF and should be pleased to see the extension of further rewards and privileges to those who have destroyed our economy. Jonathan Moyo appears to believe that these leaders have the divine right to retain their authority, even though they brought development to a halt and placed the maintenance of our existing infrastructure beyond our reach.

According to Jonathan Moyo, we should be delighted to have the people who made us dependent on food aid carry on in office and we should show nothing but respect and admiration to those people who destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs and forced all those who wanted to work to move to foreign countries. And of course, we should all share his deep satisfaction that very nearly all the land reclaimed for the people is now lying fallow and the country’s principal crops are now thatching grass and firewood.

With such achievements to support their claimed absolute right to rule the country forever, they believe that we, the electorate, have the clear obligation to serve them faithfully, to believe everything they tell us and, most important of all, to automatically define any and every reference to regime change is blasphemy.

If that set of absurd claims were not insulting enough, Jonathan Moyo goes on to claim that every sign of resentment, opposition or dissatisfaction displayed by any of us must have been sponsored and funded from abroad. In other words, we are all far too stupid to have had such ideas on our own, or to organise ourselves, put alternative policies on paper or get eager support from people who are desperate for change.

Zanu PF seems to start with the assumption that the MDC can safely be accused of each and every one of the long list of schemes, scams and strategies that Zanu PF has adopted over the years. A useful start would be the countries that funded, trained and supplied the separate divisions of what became Zanu PF. The Soviet Union and China were of course the main sponsors, but we should not forget about Yugoslavia, North Korea and Cuba, nor should we overlook Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

Of course, the Zanu PF hierarchy would claim that seeking help from abroad was entirely justified as the regime change then being promoted was designed to overthrow a severely oppressive regime. No argument there. But where is the difference now? Zanu PF has turned out to be many orders of magnitude more oppressive than any colonial administration.

In the Rhodesian days we saw it as our National duty to oppose and displace a government that had no respect for the overwhelming majority of the population, so our regime change objective was entirely acceptable. Today we are a traumatised nation living in fear, subject to harassment from police, military and youth militia, all of whose personnel have presidential protection and are free to act with impunity.

Many of us now depend on food handouts and the little our relatives can send us from abroad. We have suffered the loss of not only most of our jobs, but the loss of training prospects as well and many have been either badly educated at school or have lost their school places completely. We have watched government helping itself to our savings and bank balances, and as corruption became institutionalised we have all seen how schemes to legalise theft have enriched the few at the direct expense of the rest of us.

Once again it has become our National duty to oppose a repressive regime, but this time it is one that has absolute contempt for the entire population. We would far prefer a peaceful transition, which would be well within our grasp if Zanu PF would start working with the Government of National Unity, instead of against it. We would also have a better chance of fixing our problems if Zanu PF was not trying to further insult our intelligence by getting Jonathan Moyo to try making all the faults appear to lie elsewhere, as far from their Zanu PF origins as possible.

This entry was posted by Sokwanele on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 11:08 am. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.