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Joice Mujuru

Joram Nyathi Spectrum
These are the policies at the very heart of the Zimbabwean revolution, but she was keen to tell us they were the product of an “unjust system”, even invoking the name of Josiah Tongogara. Only she is fighting a system she was instrumental in creating, if indeed it is such an unjust system. That is why

for now she would be so useful to the powers which have been fighting the Zanu-PF government for years.

THE ultimate goal remains the same: regime change. The method? Whichever horse will deliver. I should, therefore, be very worried if I were in Dr Joice Mujuru’s position.

Very worried. When you see hyenas all of a sudden trying to encircle and offer protection to a goat’s child, know something is very wrong.

Former Vice President Joice Mujuru held a Press conference in Harare on Tuesday to announce the launch of her Zimbabwe People First political party (Never mind the symbolic distance between the opulence of Meikles Hotel and the poverty-stricken people on whose behalf she purported to launch the party).

She beamed with pride. She was surrounded by every who-is-who of those opposed to the governing Zanu-PF party.

These included most of the people who were expelled from Zanu-PF itself between 2014 and last year.

There were the usual diplomats who, not so long ago, were always by Tsvangirai’s side, ready to handhold him to State House. The same diplomats who, not so long ago, beyond diplomatic courtesies, would have publicly used a stick to shake Mujuru’s hand for fear of catching leprosy as a member of Zanu-PF’s governing elite but privately reportedly met her to discuss a future Zimbabwe where she would possibly be in charge.

She called the launch of her party a historic day for the country. Because, presumably, she had solidly cut her umbilical connections with her Zanu-PF parents and colleagues. That meant she must recant her alliances, become an apostate.

Dr Mujuru said one of the priorities of her political party, on assuming state power, would be for Zimbabwe to rejoin the Commonwealth.

She wants “investor-friendly policies to stimulate economic activity”.

The Commonwealth is a club of former British colonies.

Zimbabwe left that institution in 2003 after it was indefinitely suspended for alleged human rights violations in Presidential elections the previous year.

Dr Mujuru probably has wonderful reasons why this institution is so dear to Zimbabwe. That can’t be anything to do with trade or investment.

The shared historical truth is that Zimbabwe won independence from Britain in 1980.

It became a member of the British Commonwealth until 2003. By then relations between the two countries had soured to their nadir over the land reform.

Britain had by then mobilised the United States and other white Commonwealth members such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand to impose sanctions to punish Zimbabwe for reclaiming its land from settler whites.

It is not clear what a return to the Commonwealth in its current form is in aid of besides trying to spite President Mugabe, who has vowed Zimbabwe would not rejoin a club which serves as a perpetual reminder of our colonial servitude.

Zimbabwe can trade with any country without being a member of the Commonwealth.

And strangely, Dr Mujuru was silent on matters of regional integration which are closer to home and more beneficial to Zimbabwe than an association of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and other former colonies of Britain.

Pursuant to her investor friendly policies, Dr Mujuru said her government would review the country’s indigenisation and black empowerment policies and carry out a comprehensive land audit.

She was alive to her audience, and wanted to make them happy. Without those policies, there is nothing to distinguish Zanu-PF from any of the former colonies which have left pre-independence structures and economic privileges intact.

These are the policies at the very heart of the Zimbabwean revolution, but she was keen to tell us they were the product of an “unjust system”, even invoking the name of Josiah Tongogara. Only she is fighting a system she was instrumental in creating, if indeed it is such an unjust system.

That is why for now she would be so useful to the powers which have been fighting the Zanu-PF Government for years.

What does she know which doesn’t incriminate her?

What plea bargaining can she do which can appease those eternally aggrieved by the sins of the land reform?

We ask these questions deliberately. Dr Mujuru was brought up by Zanu-PF from the time of the liberation war. She was a minister in various portfolios up to the time she was appointed Vice President in 2004.

In that very senior position, she was President Mugabe’s number two for 10 years. In those 34 years at the top of the governing party and its government, we have no record of her criticising the “unjust system”.

Instead, even after her expulsion, sorry her “resignation” in December 2014, she told the nation she was Zanu-PF, she had never known any other home but Zanu-PF, President Mugabe was her father and she would never challenge him for power.

Most people believed her. So she can’t convince anyone that the “unjust system” evolved in the short period she has been out of Zanu-PF.

Her avowals are on record. Also on record is her displeasure with the media for highlighting corruption in “the system” when she felt her allies were being targeted.

One thing Dr Mujuru complained of when she was under fire from colleagues in the party was that there were people who wanted to destroy Zanu-PF from within.

She never declared then, as she claims now, that she was among those who wanted a democratic and constitutional reform of the party from within. She was happy.

Now it turns out, she wants to join hands with those who have always fought Zanu-PF from without, those trying to convince Africans that democracy and human rights are incompatible with the economic empowerment of blacks through land reform.

Yet she is not entirely to blame. She is a product of Zanu-PF’s failure to resolve its internal dynamics with sensitivity in the absence of a strong external existential threat.

The collapse of the MDC exposed this.

Mujuru is caught between a rock and a hard place. She has tried to explain all this of late, asserting that she was betrayed or let down.

By her own professions, she is Zanu-PF and she loves it. Her dilemma leading to the formation of her Zimbabwe People First was how to fight those in Zanu-PF she believes did her an injustice, without getting into a personal confrontation with President Mugabe.

Unfortunately, in forming her party as part of an army to fight her enemies, she finds herself in the camp of those who have always sought to destroy Zanu-PF along with its leader, the regime change brigade in whose private eyes she is as guilty as everything Zanu-PF.

For her liberation war record, they have a huge catch, but for different ends.

She has a huge image and credibility war ahead to fight without herself betraying the driving force behind the liberation struggle.