Once labelled “criminals surrounding the President,” our fallen angels are back — with bleached reputations and creased suits — ready to ruin us afresh with recycled vigour.
It was May 1999 when Robert Mugabe, in a moment of delusional reformism, appointed a 400-member Constitutional Commission.
Enter Jonathan Moyo, the Ford Foundation fugitive with enough verbosity to make a parrot seem reticent.
By February 2000, Moyo had helped produce a draft constitution so unpalatable that Zimbabweans rejected it en masse — the first time ZANU-PF tasted electoral humiliation in a major vote.
Of course, Jonathan didn’t take the loss personally.
He came out of that national rejection rebranded as the inventor of the term “protest vote,” cleverly recasting a devastating loss as a minor emotional tantrum by voters against their dearly beloved ZANU-PF.
After ZANU-PF barely scraped through the 2000 Parliamentary elections, Mugabe — in his usual panic mode — decided the problem wasn’t with his outdated liberation war dogma, but with the lack of technocrats.
So he brought in the flamboyant Moyo and the ever-elusive Nkosana Moyo.
One Moyo stayed.
Guess which is which.
Soon, Jonathan Moyo, now Information Minister, became a one-man government.
He ran ZBC, controlled Zimpapers, colonised the music industry, and even ghost-wrote for other ministries.
He made censorship an art, propaganda a science, and arrogance a virtue.
His masterpieces?
AIPPA and POSA — draconian laws that muzzled the press and gave police officers the legal right to arrest your future intentions.
But alas, power is a seductive poison.
By 2004, Moyo fancied himself a kingmaker, backing Emmerson Mnangagwa in an internal succession bid.
That gamble cost him his job and ZANU-PF membership.
But like a politically possessed Lazarus, he returned in 2005 as an independent MP — and again in 2008 — before trading in his independence for a cushy ZANU-PF seat in 2010.
Principle, you ask?
Then came the creation of G40, a clique of Machiavellian misfits: Kasukuwere, Zhuwao, Mzembi, Chombo, and the indomitable First Shopper, Grace Mugabe.
Together, they turned ZANU-PF into a dysfunctional family business with Grace as the attack dog and Bob as the dozing chairperson.
But in their quest to outsmart Mnangagwa, they forgot the army — a small oversight that saw them chased out in November 2017 by soldiers with guns and vendettas.
The public was told it was merely a targeted operation to remove “criminals surrounding the President. ” Turns out the targets were just competitors in the looting relay.
Chombo was the first to be rehabilitated — or rather, quietly de-radicalised and released.
Jonathan Moyo, now a subtle Murakashi on X (formerly Twitter), is polishing his rhetoric and rehearsing for his second re-admission into ZANU-PF.
That’s right, two-time expellee now applying for a loyalty discount. 🔗 Read Full Article
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