Which is which?

Which is which?

• Jonathan Maphenduka: Who are the real tribalists

• Geoffrey Nyarota: Making political capital out of a national tragedy

• Kuthula Matshazi: It's not fiction, Ndebeles are marginalised

• Khanyisela Moyo: Ndebele minority needs constitutional protection

• Sam Sipepa Nkomo: A case for provincialisation in Zimbabwe

• Kevin Eagle and Gregory Stanton: Genocide in Zimbabwe

• Lance Guma: Mkhwananzi's mix of sense and non-sense

• George Mkhwananzi: Ndebeles and Zimbabwe national leadership

• Lance Guma: Lessons drenched in blood

• Black murder, white murder

• Dumisani Zifa Ndlovu: 'Mnangagwa has Matabele blood on his hands'

• Mnangagwa, Dabengwa clash over Mat massacres

• Mugabe faces class lawsuit over massacres

• Honour of journalist who first exposed Mat killings

By Jonathan Moyo, MP

TODAY'S Financial Gazette (May 4, 2006, p. 9) carries a grammatically pathetic tribal story under the headline, “Who are the real tribalists?” purportedly authored by somebody conveniently called Jonathan Moyo.

One does not have to be a specialist of any kind to realize that the intended tribal mischief behind the feeble story is to give the false impression to unsuspecting readers that I am the author of the silly story and that I am therefore associated with the poorly written tribal nonsense designed to cause confusion.

It is therefore clear to me that the misrepresentation of the story is intended to invite an attribution to me at the instigation of the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO).

For the record, I wish to point out that I did not and could not write that tribal story. I honestly believe that the real author of the story must be an illiterate CIO coward and a tribal confusionist who not only does not know how to write in English but who also lacks the courage of his own weird tribal conviction.

The reason I believe this to be the case is not hard to understand. It is common cause which has not been denied that the CIO owns and controls the Financial Gazette through a front company. The article in question has all the typical footprints of the CIO including the use of a mischievously chosen pseudonym for the cowardly real author.

Reading between the lines of the article, it is obvious that the CIO and those in power for whom it is doing dirty political work has been stung by the undeniable bare facts contained in my recent three part article. “Tsholotsho Saga: the untold story” published by the Zimbabwe Independent and are now resorting to madness in a desperate effort to find a response to the Tsholotsho ghost that is haunting Zanu PF.

I want to make it clear that, following the shocking revelations that have not been denied that the CIO owns and controls the Financial Gazette, I resolved never to speak to that irretrievably compromised paper let alone write for it. This is because I know only too well the dirty tricks of the CIO and I will not be part of the charade.

I am of course aware that I am not the only Jonathan Moyo in Zimbabwe as there are indeed many Zimbabweans who share the name. For this reason a reputable newspaper that has no sinister agenda of causing confusion on behalf of a sinister organization like the CIO would not fail to define the background of its authors, especially where there is an obvious possibility of mistaken identity. Because of this failure, I have received numerous telephone calls from people who are shocked and who want to know if I wrote the article in question and who get even more shocked upon learning that I did not write the offensive article carrying my name.

"It is plain idiocy for anybody, let alone Nyarota, to proclaim that when people who lost their loved ones during the Gukurahundi days recall their loss they are seeking to derive personal political capital from a national tragedy"

JONATHAN MOYO, MP

The fact that the editors of the Financial Gazette did not clarify for their readers which Jonathan Moyo wrote the silly tribal article shows that they are indeed a very dangerous lot because of their apparent common purpose with the sinister CIO. What would these editors think if the Herald were to publish a stupid tribal opinion piece under a name only given as Sunsleey Chamunorwa written in terrible English with incomprehensible sentences such as “I must not aberrate (sic.) away from the topic…”? Would they bury their thick CIO heads in the sand in the comfort of the knowledge that there are too many Sunsleey Chamunorwas out there?

After reading the tribal article which reads like familiar material that has been previously published by the same paper and whose authorship has been falsely attributed to me by the Financial Gazette, I thought that this could be a result of an ugly incompetence by the paper’s subeditors who were confusing me for Jonathan Maphenduka who is one of the new columnists at the Fingaz. But this possibility immediately disappeared when I realized that Jonathan Maphenduka’s column is branded “perspectives” and this branding is conspicuously not in the article attributed to me. Furthermore, Maphenduka’s column is in today’s Financial Gazette, just below Geoffrey Nyarota’s piece, with the title “Are we under sanctions from our neighbors?” on page 13.

Curiously though, the article published under my name appears on the Financial Gazette’s web version—with the same article and same everything—and Jonathan Maphenduka is named as the author! This is what betrays the hand of the CIO at the Fingaz. How can one and the same article appear under the name of Jonathan Moyo in the printed version and Jonathan Maphenduka in the web version? Which is which? And how can Jonathan Maphenduka have one article in the printed version and another and totally different article in the web version of the same issue of the Financial Gazette? It appears that the CIO editors at the Financial Gazette wanted to attribute to me a scurrilous tribal article in the printed version of the paper in the vain hope of causing confusion among street readers of the paper.

What makes the case of these CIO managed editors hopeless is that they are the same folks who have been publishing patently tribal articles by one Geoffrey Nyarota whose new column in the Financial Gazette has had an unprofessional and unethical fixation with one tribal topic and the hatred of one set of individuals from a particular tribe ever since the column was launched some five or so weeks ago.

Nyarota’s installment in today’s Financial Gazette is not different from his previous tribal lamentations and dovetails neatly with the other story in the same paper which is the subject of this statement in a manner that suggests that there is a regrouping of 1980s CIO forces at work which are now converging at the Financial Gazette. Just look at who are the other new columnists there and ask yourself where they used to work in the 1980s and 1990s and you will notice a staggering CIO pattern.

And Nyarota has the temerity to write today that Zimbabweans who lost their loved ones during the Gukurahundi massacres should remain silent about their loss otherwise they will be accused of mentioning their losses in order to make political capital. Honestly, how foolish can one get?

Only the CIO with the help of double agents like Geoffrey Nyarota and other columnists now writing weekly nonsense in the Financial Gazette can ever expect victims of Gukurahundi to remain silent about their tragedy in the same way Nyarota was silent when he edited the Chronicle in Bulawayo during the government massacres of more than 20 000 innocent people in Matabeleland and Midlands provinces. To claim, as does Nyarota in the Financial Gazette today, that those who for one reason or another find themselves having to recall their ordeal or loss do so in pursuit of political capital is as cruel as the effect of the massacres themselves.

Why should victims of these massacres, who like Welshman Ncube suffered personally, be gagged into silence out the foolish fear that speaking out will be misunderstood by Zanu PF politicians and the CIO? Everyday and certainly every week the public media carries stories of Zanu PF politicians recalling their personal suffering and losses during the liberation war and even more times we have Robert Mugabe telling us about his own personal losses and sacrifices during the war with the most recent example being the story of how he and Edgar Tekere left Rhodesia for Mozambique on April 4, 1975. Why do Nyarota and the CIO’s Fingaz keep quiet about that nonsense but make a lot of noise about people who recall their suffering during the Gukurahundi massacres. Does Nyarota still believe that he can continue to hide the Gukurahundi massacres as he did while he was editor of the Chronicle? If he does, then he is living in a fool’s paradise because big time surprises await him and his CIO masters in the days to come.

Apart from being extremely cruel, it is plain idiocy for anybody, let alone Geoffrey Nyarota, to proclaim that when people who lost their loved ones during the Gukurahundi days recall their loss they are seeking to derive personal political capital from a national tragedy. Losing a loved one is not a national tragedy to the one bearing the loss. Such a loss is always very much a personal tragedy; deeply personal. This is true across the globe in the civilized world.

The only people who do not know this or who do not understand it are those who were either behind the Gukurahundi massacres or those who participated and are still participating in the cover up of these massacres through media misrepresentation or those who are just terrible human beings because of their personal hatred of individuals and/or groups.

The way Nyarota deals with the case of the disclosure in my curriculum vitae about the tragic fate of my father at the hands of the Fifth Brigade, leaves me persuaded that he has not at all graduated from his behavior in the Gukurahundi days when what he wrote in the Chronicle was framed within the brutal confines of the world according to the CIO. This is because he conveniently overlooks the fact that my curriculum vitae in question was exclusively and confidentially submitted to the Zanu PF politburo and not to any media house for confidential purposes of the politburo which wanted the information about my personal, professional and political background. It was appropriate to disclose that information in that specific and confidential case. I did not make a public disclosure.

But the CIO together with some reckless politburo members and some media types like Geoffrey Nyarota decided to make that disclosure public. The decision was not mine but theirs and they should fry in their own fat. Otherwise I am still praying that I will get an opportunity to make a fuller and detailed public disclosure about this matter before an impartial judiciary body just one day. Nyarota and his CIO editors at the Financial Gazette can forget about me remaining silent. I will never ever do that.

I would have thought that Nyarota, who has boasted that he discovered me as columnist when he edited a better and more reliable, independently owned, Financial Gazette in the 1990s would also remember that one of the important articles I wrote then was on the Gukurahundi massacres in which I said that as victims we were prepared to forgive but never to forget the massacres.

So no, we will not forget our personal tragedies and losses and that means we will never remain silent about them. Furthermore, this means that we will never ever allow anyone, no matter how powerful or stupid they are, to intimidate us into silence through the making of tribal innuendos. Even having the CIO to write tribal articles in the Financial Gazette under my name will not silence or intimidate me.

Professor Jonathan Moyo is Member of Parliament for Tsholotsho and can be contacted at moyoz@mweb.co.zw
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