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Joice Mujuru

NO amount of posturing can hide Runaida Mugari’s nakedness, no amount of henna or kohl can cover the dark spots on those ample cheeks. She surely has something in common with Tsvangirai!

Well, it seems the Romans were not amiss in believing that the month of March belongs to the warlike Mars, the deity who personifies the protection of the state and the productivity of the community. This year, Mars will not be disappointed as history has it that the party that won the liberation war, whose Government has always protected and guaranteed the sovereignty of the Zimbabwean state always prevails over all adversaries in this month. In March 1980, Abel Muzorewa, Ndabaningi Sithole, Jeremiah Chirau and Ian Smith saw their dream of a country with a surname go up in smoke when they lost the first democratic elections by a wide margin to Zanu (PF). Since then everything that has been thrown at the state has fizzled out like spent matches.

For Mars has always smiled on our beautiful land. The 67 mercenaries arrested in Harare in 2004 were nabbed on March 7. The same applies to the three American terrorists -Garry George Blanchard, Joseph Wendell Pettijohn and John Lamonte Dixon – who were arrested in 1999 at the Harare International Airport, they again met their fate on March 7. Much as the forces of regime change might want to march on, there is no escaping the Ides of March. As for Tsvangirai, unlike Caesar there won’t be anyone to bury him; no friends, no Romans – no countrymen!

Well, you might be wondering what we are fulminating about.

Well, Joice Mujuru (nee Mugari), like all askaris, has undressed herself in the month of March.

She proved she was not the ‘‘gandanga rine chivindi’’ that her praise-singers would have us believe at her sparsely attended rallies. Faced with two white interlocutors, Mujuru reduced herself to Runaida Mugari, that teen girl who carried food to guerrillas like Cde Chipembere.

As a family paper, we will not dwell on details of her encounter with Cde Chipembere (wink).

Well, Joice Mujuru died the moment she opened her mouth to repudiate the liberation struggle on BBC and Deutsche Welle this week.

She told her interlocutors that she had nothing to do with every pro-people policy that zanu-pf launched since independence in 1980.

She openly said she was discussing compensation with Guy Watson-Smith, the white former farmer who once held the farm that was left to her by her late husband Solomon. She appeared lost to the fact that before that white brigand laid hands on what is now Ruzambo Farm, he dispossessed indigenous Zimbabweans who laid claim to that land, itself the raison d’être of the liberation struggle.

That is why she was in Zambia and Mozambique. She wasn’t there as General Mujuru’s concubine, unless of course that is what she was there for. But everybody else she saw there was there because they wanted their land back.

Well, Joice had no qualms showing she had lived a lie over the past 34 years, prior to her expulsion from zanu-pf but appeared lost to the fact that her repudiation of the political profile the nation gave her since 1980 means she effectively reduces herself to the days of Cde Chipembere when she was just pimply Runaida Mugari.

She is advised to remember the wisdom in the words of Jamaican national hero, Marcus Garvey, who said, ‘’ … a people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.’’

And a tree without roots is dead.

By repudiating the struggle, which should have been her bargaining chip in her talks with Tsvangirai in the proposed coalition, Joice lowered her stock. A history which she would have used to divide the Zanu-PF vote, Joice effectively lowered her stock as a political player.

She thus approaches Tsvangirai as a junior partner.

Without that history she has distanced herself from, she is a tabla rasa, no different from the woman next door.

Prof Moyo

Nutty, nutty Professor

While Mujuru’s weaknesses are too many, there was one thing that no one can take from her, she had the Nutty Professor figured out.

She once lambasted Jonso for thinking he was the best thing since sliced bread, that he mistakenly thought the size of his head was directly proportional to cognitive abilities.

We couldn’t agree more.

This week we carried a story in which a number of analysts berated Prof Moyo for his acerbic attacks on Government’s Command Agriculture programme.

One of the analysts could not have put it any better where he said Prof Moyo appeared to be suffering from opposition demons having spent more time in opposition politics than he has in zanu-pf.

Touche!

For we find Prof Moyo’s behaviour not only shocking but reprehensible for the following reasons.

Firstly, the Command Agriculture Programme is a Government initiative, Prof Moyo is part of that Government yet in his acerbic attacks he appears to distance himself from the programme, itself the bane of opposition politics as Dr Mujuru has been showing us in her bumbling interviews.

Secondly, Prof Moyo is choosing to ignore the platforms at his disposal, namely the weekly Cabinet meetings, and the zanu-pf Politburo to air his concerns, choosing instead to grandstand on social media, raising questions about his motivations given that party leader, President Mugabe, is on record discouraging party members from discussing party and Government business on social media.

Is Prof Moyo resorting to social media because he is denied a platform in the party and Government?

We find this difficult to believe given that President Mugabe has, not once but repeatedly, urged zanu-pf leaders to desist from taking party and Government programmes to social media.

Prof Moyo is aware of this but chooses to go against the advice of his principal, again raising questions about his motives.

This is not to say Prof Moyo should not criticise Government programmes, it is his constitutional right but then he is not an independent legislator. He was elected to Parliament on a zanu-pf ticket, and picked to serve in Government from a Zanu-PF pool. Zanu-PF, like all private clubs, has its own rules that he should abide by.

We also find it quite ironic, if not very instructive, that Prof Moyo is on a spirited campaign to demonise a programme anchored on Zanu-PF’s economic blueprint Zim-Asset, specifically the food and nutrition cluster.

Command Agriculture is one of the successes Zanu-PF can point to going into election 2018, and it is quite instructive that Prof Moyo has made it his vocation to trash that programme.

We are thus left wondering, particularly since the Prof is on record – during his days in opposition – saying the best way to beat Zanu-PF is to fight from within.

The burden of proof is on Prof Moyo to show that his criticism of Command Agriculture and flagrant disregard of his principal’s wise counsel are couched in good intentions.