Herald political editor jumps ship

Herald political editor jumps ship

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By Lindie Whiz

THE Herald’s political editor quit the paper this week to take up a job with a university in Botswana, New Zimbabwe.com can reveal.

Caesar Zvayi, a former teacher, was never far from controversy after joining the stridently pro-government daily in 2005.

As political editor, Zvayi oversaw the Herald’s constant stream of propaganda and an anti-western slant in his editorials while propping-up an increasingly unpopular government.

Zvayi once calculated that US President George Bush “lied 237 times over Iraq” and called the US ambassador to Zimbabwe James Mcgee “over-excited”.

Zvayi, according to Herald sources, left on Sunday from the Harare International Airport after landing a job with an unnamed university in Botswana as a media/journalism lecturer.

Zvayi gave up his company car which was driven back to the Herald offices in central Harare by reporter, Wonder Guchu.

Colleagues said Zvayi privately confided that he did not see a future at the Herald, “even if President Mugabe won the June 27 election”.

“He said Mugabe’s days were numbered, whatever the outcome of the June 27 election and he did not want to sink with him,” a source said.

Zvayi, according to sources, had intended to leave before the March 29 polls saying he could not stand “being humiliated” in the event of an opposition victory.

Those who know him say Zvayi was not always a keen follower of President Robert Mugabe. As a student at Bindura University, he led protests against rising fees and was known to speak out against government corruption.

But once he moved to the Herald, after a stint as a geography teacher, Zvayi became the voice of Mugabe’s government. He targeted opposition leaders and western envoys with some virulent editorials which often provoked an official reaction.

But his grasp of facts, or lack of, was a gift for satirists – notably the Independent’s Muckraker who pleasured himself on Zvayi’s paucity of truth.

In 2006, Zvayi took his propaganda to new levels by claiming that explorer David Livingstone was a “cohort” of colonialism icon Cecil John Rhodes. Of course Rhodes was only 20 when Livingstone died in 1873 and the two men never met. In fact Livingstone left Africa in 1864, when Rhodes was just 11.

Zvayi once complained that there were not enough children’s dolls “with negroid features” on sale in Harare. Black mothers were “falling over each other” to buy those with “Caucasian features”, he said.

Muckraker quipped: “Zvayi should get real and stop swallowing the self-serving rubbish dumped on him by the President’s Office.”

Recently, another senior Herald reporter Innocent Gore quit to take up a job in neighbouring Namibia.
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