Moyo is no Messiah, why waste tears?

Moyo is no Messiah, why waste tears?

• Tamborinyoka: 'Let Moyo stew in his unpublished views'

• Your Shouts!: Moyo a hero? Are crazy?

• OPINION: 'Moyo just a village hero'

• ADMORE TSHUMA: Jonathan Moyo, my hero

• PROFILE: JONATHAN NATHANIEL MOYO

• Mugabe's former spin doctor fights eviction

By Tawanda Hove

THE debate over the fate of Jonathan Moyo was sealed a long time ago when he decided to accept an invitation to join Mugabe’s run around lackeys – he made his choices and his relevance or irrelevance must be judged according to this choice.

Politics affords you the space to make choice on the basis of individual satisfaction – so goes the ‘political theory of rational choice’ – that many would be aware of. With the University of Witwatersrand on his heels and the Ford Foundation (that imperialist organization as we would be made to believe) breathing fire and brimstone on his neck Jonathan Moyo had no option but to join the ZANU PF bandwagon.

To him ZANU PF was a haven from which he could protect himself from those that were demanding him to account for what he had taken. At an intellectual level Jonathan Moyo knew immediately after the failure of the Constitutional Referendum that he had committed 'suicide'. Brother Ken Mufuka aptly described the situation by saying, “Brother Moyo is a sinner and a Pharisee, full of pomposity and hot air.”

Jonathan Moyo made his choices like many others. The list is endless of people who have made these choices - Moise Tshombe of the Congo, Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Alfonso Dhlakama in Mozambique to name but a few, what about Abel Muzorewa when he rode the ‘donkey pulled cart’ into State House on behalf of Smith and his bandits. World history - Zimbabweans must know this - is fraught with people many of them previously respected who made choices to be soldiers of fortune. And those that understand how soldiers of fortune operate is that if they don’t get paid or if they get impatient over issues they shoot the one that hired them. In this case Zanu PF proved to be a ‘bigger’ phenomenon than what Jonathan Moyo had calculated.

Who remembers the bombing of the Daily News press just after he labeled it an enemy of the ‘people of Zimbabwe’? People of Zimbabwe sometimes have a short memory and this is very dangerous, do we forget the unemployed Daily News journalists who roamed the streets? How about the thousands of vendors who were left with nothing to feed on? Were there no Ndebele people among these people? When a news blackout was commandeered by the Information Department was Matabeleland spared because Jonathan Moyo’s family was harassed and persecuted by Mugabe’s thugs?

Must we shed tears with such a man? Must we not eat because today the snakes are wrangling? Must we loose sleep because the witches are fighting? Those who shed tears must be understood where they are coming from. Like any other politician Moyo had a group of sycophants who were occasionally dining from his table and when the masters’ table has been tipped, sure, the servants must cry most because they are the most vulnerable. Now we would have to believe that Moyo had the interests of people of Matabeleland at heart - what rubbish and hogwash.

"To come round and only see the few computers and a few books that Moyo donated as part of a proverbial leadership Hegira to bring the people of Matabeleland to the promised land is a dicey choice to take"

TAWANDA HOVE

Has the first independent publication in Bulawayo not been shut down by laws mobilized by Jonathan Moyo against freedom of thought even by the people of Tsholotsho? Was Radio Dialogue not denied a license by laws mobilized by this hero of Matabeleland? It is up to the people in Matabeleland to provide leadership over how to deal with what happened in the 1980s otherwise most of the people will be mobilized to become political fodder for mischievous politicians who did not shed a tear when people were being bayoneted to death. Every Jim, Jerry and Jack will ride on the anger and marginalization of these people until there is nothing left to turn to.

Then there is a claim that he was bringing development to Matabeleland. What must be understood from the onset is that development is a right to the people of Zimbabwe, it is not a favor. As citizens of this country we have a right to a dignified life, to have a job, to have an education, to have water, to have a functional system of government that administers its sovereign affairs in the interest of all Zimbabweans. Now that the ruling government has failed to deliver and political turncoats manipulate this failure of development then Zimbabweans celebrate and say ‘Glory be to this son of Tsholotsho”. Well I have a simple message. Simply because the government has failed to deliver you must utilize the computers, the roads and whatever you were given but never must you be say we will thank you because you had mercy on us --- you have a right to development as people of Matabeleland and when politicians don’t fulfill national obligations they must be made accountable not by accepting piece-meal buy outs from spinners like Moyo.

Apart from Jonathan Moyo being a spirited spinner for the regime he took upon himself a deeper and intricate intellectual adventure which involved constructing what Professor Terence Ranger has termed the ‘patriotic history’ or “Mugabeism’. The impact he left in this venture is likely to live for long. In the youth camps this particular genre of history denied any other narratives to the youth of Zimbabwe. His ambition was to liquidate any ‘pluralist’ approach to the history of Zimbabwe - it was a classic example of George Orwell’s 1984 in which all history is deleted except that which is concocted and agrees to the dear leader.

In 1984, writes Orwell, "Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."

Even facts are rewritten and reissued, books are edited and modified and this happened in Zimbabwe. This ‘patriotic history’ observes Prof Ranger, ‘…is hammered home by television, radio and the state press. It is taught in the militia camps from Mugabe's Inside the Third Chimurenga; in schools with textbooks written by the Minister of Education; in colleges and polytechnics in the form of a compulsory 'Strategic and National Studies' course’. And much of this work is Jonathan Moyo’s , at a crude level ZANU PF is simply seen as a machinery of violence that is used to maintain a waning hegemony but at an intellectual level Jonathan Moyo employed his sophistry to construct this particular history of Zimbabwe.

It is an exclusionary history that is fraught with a ZANU PF story and not a national story -- academics and any other progressive minded Zimbabwean would have to struggle to ‘de-mine’ this field. So, to then come round and only see the few computers and a few books that Jonathan Moyo donated as part of a proverbial leadership Hegira to bring the people of Matabeleland to the promised land is a dicey choice to take. To let your hearts be moved by a sentimentality that clouds your sober judgment is to be trapped to let your hearts be moved by crocodile tears. This I agree with Daniel Molokela I won’t do.

These eyes of mine will not shed a tear.
Hove is a university student in Cape Town, South Africa
JOIN THE DEBATE ON THIS ARTICLE ON THE NEWZIMBABWE.COM FORUMS
newsdesk@newzimbabwe.com