ZANU PF officials revealed to have been privately agitating for President Robert Mugabe's exit in leaked United States diplomatic cables must now "cooperate or perish", former Information Minister Jonathan Moyo warns.

The Tsholotsho North MP said the conspirators against Mugabe’s rule had been “exposed”, and their political futures would only be secured by backing the Zanu PF leader “in tangible ways”.

In a Sapes Trust lecture on the implications of the release of the cables by WikiLeaks, Moyo said the dispatches showed the United States government dabbling in Zimbabwe’s politics with a strategy to either force Mugabe out through internal Zanu PF opposition or a regime change strategy to uproot him and his party from power.

“Isolating Mugabe from Zanu PF is now neither workable nor possible because those Zanu PF leaders who were key to this strategy have been exposed and their only option is to cooperate or perish,” Moyo said, speaking in Harare on Thursday night.

He said Mugabe’s internal critics “now have nowhere to hide”, adding: “The only thing they can do is to seek President Mugabe and hope and pray for his understanding by supporting him in tangible ways beyond mere rhetoric.”

Moyo should know the cost of Mugabe’s vengeance after he was expelled by Zanu PF in 2005, months after he was accused of orchestrating a palace coup.

Following his exit, he ran for MP in Tsholotsho North as an independent and the US diplomatic cables show him telling American diplomats “a Zanu PF party led by Mugabe was likely to lose any election”.

But he reminded a packed Sapes Trust Seminar Room that he had never held meetings with American diplomats while serving in government or as deputy secretary for information in Zanu PF.

“I was fully entitled to have those conversations without reference to anyone as an independent Member of Parliament who was then in the political wilderness following the debacle of the so-called Tsholotsho Declaration that never was,” Moyo said.

Although an open political secret that Zanu PF is split into factions, all competing to replace Mugabe, the full extent of the plotting was previously unknown before the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks, published over 2,998 cables revealing secret meetings between Zanu PF top leaders and American diplomats.

Vice Presidents Joice Mujuru and John Nkomo, Defence Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa and Indigenisation Minister Saviour Kasukuwere are some of the officials who are revealed to have been calling for change in private.

“The tittle-tattle in the cables about President Mugabe’s succession reached a peak in 2005 when the chatting became a free-for-all and even more robust with calls from across the political spectrum, but especially from within Zanu PF, as witnessed at the party’s 2006 Goromonzi annual people’s conference, that President Mugabe ‘must go’,” said Moyo, a member of Zanu PF’s politburo.

But the former university lecturer insists that the 2008 elections in which Mugabe failed to win outright and the country faced paralysis as a result of a hung parliament shocked Zanu PF leaders into embracing their leader again.

“The cables bear the point is that in the first place, the so-called Zanu PF hardliners who had been isolated from President Mugabe after the fallout from the 2004 Zanu PF Congress reconciled with him in 2008 during the campaign for the presidential run-off election to stop regime change,” Moyo said.

“This is captured in the cables, and I can confirm it as one of those who was directly involved. This development struck a blow to what until then had been a successful strategy to isolate President Mugabe from Zanu PF and to accordingly weaken the party by dividing it to render it incapable of cohesive action.

“... the whole three-pronged US strategy to effect either leadership change in Zanu PF and the government or regime change in Zimbabwe has come to grief. This is because a strategy against your opponents is useful only if they don’t get to know anything about it.”

Moyo said only “dilettantes” would find it difficult to accept that those who once plotted against Mugabe can change their minds and become his staunch supporters.

“Parenthetically, the idea that it is duplicitous or wrong for one, whether in Zanu PF or any other party, to oppose President Mugabe today only to emerge supporting him tomorrow is truly primitive,” Moyo said.

“Practical politics is not a religion but it changes like the weather informed by a stable climate. Everyday politics is like the weather. Yesterday’s weather has nothing to do with today’s weather or tomorrow’s weather for that matter.

“The time has come for us as a nation to focus on policies over faces and then it won’t matter whether the leader of our party or country is old or young; or whether he or she is formally educated or not. Policies must matter over personalities.”