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Prof Moyo

Lloyd Gumbo Senior Reporter—
GOVERNMENT will counter former Vice President Joice Mujuru’s cabal from railroading its activities by pre-occupying itself with service delivery more than politics, a Cabinet minister has said. Dr Mujuru and her cabal cannot come to terms with their failure to make it into the Zanu-PF leadership as well as in Government after they were axed for failing to meet expected standards.

As a result, they have adopted a four-pronged approach to wrestle power from Zanu-PF which includes litigation, forming a splinter party, fighting from within and re-engaging President Mugabe.

But Government spokesperson Professor Jonathan Moyo, who is the Information, Media and Broadcasting Services Minister, yesterday said Dr Mujuru and her cabal had reached an irreconcilable point with the revolutionary party.

He made the remarks while delivering a lecture to students of the Joint Command and Staff Course Number 28 at the Zimbabwe Staff College on the country’s political environment.

Prof Moyo said while Zimbabwe had challenges in the past, among them the disturbances after independence that culminated in the historic Unity Accord between the two revolutionary parties Zanu-PF and PF Zapu, the current differences in Zanu-PF were different.

“In this particular case, the only response that will be commensurate with the challenge is for us for the first time as a country, to move away from pre-occupation with State politics into more pre-occupation with service delivery,” he said.

“The only answer to these people is to ensure that the electoral mandate that the President got from the voters when the time of assessing it comes in the next 36 months or so has been fulfilled and it can only be fulfilled through service delivery.”

Prof Moyo said the developments in the revolutionary party were not peculiar to Zanu-PF as other liberation movements in the region had gone through the same challenges.

He said the implementation of the Zim-Asset would carry the day for the Government regardless of what Dr Mujuru’s cabal does.

Zim-Asset identifies four clusters – Food Security and Nutrition, Social Services and Poverty Eradication, Infrastructure and Utilities and Value Addition and Beneficiation – as integral to economic turnaround and uplifting livelihoods.

Prof Moyo said those were the issues that Zimbabweans expected their Government to address.

“They want to see us attending to the so-called bread and butter issues and that is exactly what Zim-Asset is doing,” he said. “And it is impossible for anyone else, especially these comrades of ours, to have the opportunity of service delivery.

“The only difficulty we have, which we have to deal with in an honest way is that because of our success in education, we are famed for having fantastic policy documents, but notorious for not implementing them.

“There is no other alternative, but to deliver and we understand that. It is the delivery which will safeguard our national security interest, which will keep our national unity and which will address the general grievances of our people.”

Prof Moyo said in order to understand Zimbabwe’s political history since independence, it would be ideal for one to look at it in phases of 15 years – from 1980-1995, then 1995-2010 and from 2010 onwards.

In the first phase, Prof Moyo said, the country was pre-occupied with nation building which brought about unity among Zimbabweans, especially after the Unity Accord.

As a result, he said, the country’s detractors have failed to ground Zimbabwe.

Prof Moyo said the second phase was the spirited attacks by Zimbabwe’s former colonisers which included, among other things, founding and funding a political party to push the revolutionary party out of Government after it embarked on the fast-track land redistribution programme.

The third phase, which is currently subsisting, he said were the differences within the revolutionary party, a development that is not peculiar to Zimbabwe.

He said in the case of other countries in the region, the differences have resulted in them being booted out of power.

“What we have here, for the first time, we have for example a former Vice President who is now an ordinary member of the party agitating with her allies and having reached what if you look objectively or critically appears to be a point of no return,” said Prof Moyo.

“It appears to have reached an irreconcilable point with the liberation movement, but claiming to be a liberation movement and the funny thing is when they come out they always want to claim that they are the true representatives of the liberation movement.

“For example, one of the members of the team that is working with the former Vice President, Rugare Gumbo, is always saying ‘we liberators have been marginalised’.

“Their face is the former Secretary for Administration of the party, but who also was minister of Presidential Affairs – that’s Didymus Mutasa. And who, among the responsibilities assigned to him by His Excellency, was responsible for national security.

“But he is the one out there making noise. It is not a good situation to have a former minister of State Security talking the kind of nonsense that Didymus is saying. In fact, it is actually unheard of.

“The good thing is if they were serious and they are working with a former minister responsible for State Security, if he was behaving as a guy who was really and honestly and truly in charge of security, he would be more circumspect than this one. We are comforted by the fact that this one clearly wasn’t in charge of our national security. That’s why he can afford to make this kind of noise that he is making.

“If he was truly in charge, he would be quiet and be the last speaking. He would keep us guessing to say ‘what’s in the head of that guy? What is he planning and so forth?’ That is what a true security person would do. But this one is a megaphone and so forth.”