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By
Professor Jonathan Moyo
FOLLOWING
the publication of Mutumwa Mawere’s article, “My
problem with Jonathan Moyo” by this website on June 5, 2006,
the editor of New Zimbabwe.com asked me to respond in the interest of
balanced public debate.
My initial view was that it was unnecessary for me to respond because Mawere has taken an apparently personalized and even defamatory approach with no self-evident public relevance or value.
Also, as my article on the Budiriro by-election dealt with Zimbabwean politics, I did not see why I had to respond to Mawere who has made a declaration under oath before the courts in South Africa denying that he is a Zimbabwean and claiming that he is a South African in order to avoid extradition to Zimbabwe.
I therefore did not think I had to bother myself debating a South African over Zimbabwean politics. But after some further nudging from the editor, I have reluctantly agreed to respond in the interest of promoting transparent debate against what I still believe is my better judgment.
Because the issues raised by Mawere in his convoluted article are many, varied and very serious in so far as some of them are even defamatory, my response is necessarily elaborate and rather long.
Although Mawere’s article purports to be reacting to my piece, “Beyond the Budiriro by-election: the state of opposition politics in Zimbabwe” published by this website last month, I don’t think anybody who has read his article would dispute that it has anything to do with the Budiriro by-election or the state of opposition politics in Zimbabwe which were the focus of my piece.
There is an explanation for this. Reading between the lines of his article, I think the reason why Mawere took a personalized approach is not necessarily because he wanted to write about me as his main focal point. Rather, it is because he realized that my piece on the Budiriro by election generated considerable interest and debate among Zimbabweans and was thus a talking point.
Being the ever wily pyramid schemer that he is, Mawere wanted to appropriate that debate and interest by shifting its attention away from the critical issues around the challenges of opposition politics in Zimbabwe towards himself and his problems. In other words, he wanted the debate to be on him and about him as a paranoid attention seeker. This explains why his article is aptly entitled, “My problem with Jonathan Moyo”. The essence of his focus is Mawere’s problems and not Zimbabwe’s problems which were the focus of my article.
Therefore, although his article is all over the place and does not seem to have a coherent running theme beyond its unprovoked personal attack on me, Mawere’s unmistakable mission in the article is two pronged: Yet again for the umpteenth time he is presenting himself not only as an allegedly wronged business mogul whose alleged assets have been illegally expropriated in Zimbabwe but also as an alleged long standing champion of democracy in Zimbabwe whose exemplary efforts through his short-lived National Development Assembly (NDA) were thwarted by those he claims also expropriated his alleged assets.
It is this two pronged thrust of Mawere’s article which I wish to address first before dealing with three specific issues that are personal to me arising from his article in question.
Why does Mawere continue to shamelessly pose: (1) as a wronged business mogul who has been robbed of his alleged assets and (2) as a frustrated human rights activist who has been denied the opportunity to bring democracy to Zimbabwe by building the nation through NDA’s television and radio programs?
I think the answer is simply because he is a compulsive yet idle attention seeker who is prone to extreme bouts of paranoia during which he tells pathological lies that are shocking to decent and well meaning people. A case in point is his outburst not too long ago when he falsely claimed that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) had used proceeds from his alleged companies to pay off Zimbabwe’s arrears to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
We all now know that nothing of the sort happened. The RBZ by its own admission printed with the knowledge of the IMF more than ZW$21 trillion which was used to purchase forex from the parallel market to settle the IMF arrears. But as a paranoid attention seeker, Mawere tried to use the RBZ’s efforts to payoff the IMF debt to draw attention to himself by writing to the IMF and by making his letters public with false claims that proceeds from his alleged assets had been raided.
In the ensuing developments Mawere was for quite sometime in the news and sensationally so because if his claims had been proven true there would have been big time trouble for the RBZ. Yet Mawere’s claims were a pack of pathological lies told by a paranoid attention seeker and that is why the IMF ignored him. As a direct result of his pathological lies on this matter, the IMF as well as many other reputable and honorable people in society now view Mawere as a nuisance given to saying anything about himself, his alleged assets and victimization.
The paranoid attention seeking behind Mawere’s IMF debacle can also be seen from his false claims about the NDA. Because he is now presenting himself as a victim Mawere wants Zimbabweans, especially those in the opposition, to believe that the NDA was an institution designed to promote democracy in Zimbabwe against Zanu PF. Yet nothing could be further from the truth as I will show below.
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I am also aware that Mawere has tried to give the impression that he was above Zanu PF politics and now claims that he snubbed the ruling party when he was offered a provincial position by the Zanu PF Masvingo provincial executive that wanted to co-opt him along with Daniel Shumba. But really there is no story here because the invitation was for Mawere to join village politics by clansmen since he was not being offered a national responsibility at ministerial level or a position in either the central committee or the politburo which he definitely would have accepted because he wanted and campaigned for positions like that.
There are only two major reasons why Mawere has sought to distance himself from Zanu PF by giving the false impression that he has always been a champion of democracy through the NDA. One is that there has had been a fallout with his Zanu PF political principals. The other, after making a lot of public noise in support of Zanu PF through the NDA and other forums, his name was included among individuals on the targeted sanctions list by Western governments, starting with the Americans, as a Zanu PF businessman benefiting from Zanu PF misrule.
This inclusion shocked him and he used his fallout with his Zanu PF political principals to start attacking the ruling party as a specific strategy of wanting to be removed from the targeted sanctions list. That’s when he started flirting with some MDC parliamentarians and making donations to the MDC which subsequently helped him to be removed from the sanctions list. If this is what Mawere means by fighting for democracy in Zimbabwe then he has a rather strange if not cynical view of politics.
Otherwise those who care to examine the record without prejudice will learn that Mawere’s NDA had nothing to do with fighting for democracy in Zimbabwe as it was formed as a Zanu PF political NGO with three overriding strategic purposes.
The first ZANU PF purpose of the NDA was to counter the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) in the hope of ultimately rendering it superfluous in national politics. This is why the NDA’s name was very close to the NCA with the difference that Zanu PF inserted a “D” for development in place of a “C” for constitutional reform. This difference was supposed to be important in demonstrating or calling attention to the fact that Zimbabweans were more interested in having national development than in having a new democratic constitution.
As such, the NDA was supposed to set a developmental agenda in place of a constitutional reform one. In this sense, it is ludicrous for Mawere to now claim that his NDA had anything to do with bringing democracy to Zimbabwe because that is a pathological lie. Also, unlike the NCA which is a membership based organization the NDA was a top down political creation with no membership support. That is why the NDA died with Mawere’s ditching of his Zimbabwean citizenship.
The second strategic purpose of the NDA had to do with creating some space for Mawere himself as an individual. At the time of the setting up of the NDA, Mawere’s Zanu PF political principals, whom he does not now want to be associated with, wanted him to be eased out of the business empire that he now says was his and his alone. This was not for political reasons as such but mainly because Mawere was said to be then interfering with business operations that were being run by salaried professionals on the ground.
Also, the professionals running the business empire were apparently increasingly viewing Mawere as a dangerous loose canon who was making all kinds of reckless political statements that were beginning to harm the businesses by attracting negative publicity as a paranoid attention seeker. The idea was that the business empire would make funds available to the NDA for Mawere’s convenience so that, as chairperson of NDA, he would use that platform to make political statements that would not damage the business empire he had become associated with as a front.
The third strategic purpose of the NDA, designed by Mawere, is that it was supposed to serve the political interests and agenda of his political principals, especially regarding the succession battles within Zanu PF, because at that time he was still in good books with them and they did not then see him as a political threat or impediment. In this third strategic sense, Mawere had promised his political principals that the NDA would play a pivotal role in Zanu PF’s succession politics.
It was during this NDA period, and in connection with the third strategic purpose, that Mawere then setup the Tribune newspaper. In his article, Mawere opportunistically tells a pathological lie that the Tribune newspaper was banned to give it the same fate as the NDA. Yet he knows only too well that he sold the Tribune to Kindness Paradza as a direct result of his fallout with his Zanu PF political principles due to conflict of the control of the business empire that had been built through Mawere’s pyramid scheming. It is a matter of the public record that the Tribune newspaper fell foul with the law because of the failure by its new owners led by Kindness Paradza to declare that there had been a change of ownership after Mawere abandoned the NDA project as he prepared to wrestle the corporate loot away from his political principals.
In any event, none of the above three strategic purposes behind the creation of the NDA succeeded because that NGO flopped like a dead duck. While Mawere’s article gives the impression that the NDA failed because of what he says was my banning of its television and radio programs, the truth of the matter is that the NDA project flopped under the weight of the folly of its own strategic purposes. In particular, NDA flopped because Mawere and his Zanu PF political principals, not partners but principals, started fighting each other as Mawere sought to run away with the business empire for which he had been a front, claiming that it was his and his alone.
While the rest about the NDA saga is history, I must address the question of why the NDA television and radio programs were discontinued by ZBC. Mawere’s article gives the impression that I banned the programs because I did not want to see democracy and nation building. That is plain crazy.
I wish to state categorically that I fully supported the permanent discontinuation of the NDA programs on television and radio and I stand by that decision even today without any qualms whatsoever. When one has a public responsibility such as I had, you are not there to appease people like Mawere who are paranoid attention seekers by allowing them to do whatever they want just because they have powerful political principals in the ruling party or just because they have a lot of money in their wallets.
It
was wrong for ZBC then to have allowed those NDA programs to be aired
in the first place. This is because the NDA was a Zanu PF political
NGO, and within Zanu PF itself it was a factional project, that was
intended to counter the NCA and prop up Mawere’s political principals
outside the rules of fair and democratic play. In the circumstances,
we could not have been able to justify having NDA running weekly television
and radio programs and not giving the same opportunity to the NCA>>>>>>>>>PLEASE
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