via Mutsvangwa: Moyo peripheral, primitive – NewZimbabwe 02/02/2016
WAR Veterans minister and chairperson of the liberation fighters association Chris Mutsvangwa says Professor Jonathan Moyo is a “peripheral” Zanu PF member who is bitter that his “uncle” Ndabaningi Sithole was removed from the leadership of the party.
Sithole was the chief architect of Zanu, formed in 1963 in Highfields. In 1964, he was elected president of the party with Mugabe his secretary general. Mugabe was to later lead a coup against Sithole and eventually become the president of Zanu PF.
Speaking to NewZimbabwe.com, Mutsvangwa said Moyo sees the party as a “clan property” and a “family heirloom” stolen from his “traitor uncle” Ndabaningi Sithole.
“He is fighting for family inheritance-a parochial, pitiable and primitive view of the generation of the Chimurenga sacrifice,” said Mutsvangwa.
He was responding to a statement by Moyo attacking the meeting held at Dzivarasekwa Presidential Guard Barracks where it was agreed that war veterans should bar the higher education minister from attending the next Politburo meeting at Zanu PF headquarters.
“The deserting professor has no iota of history about Zanu PF. Miffed by the jettisoning of renegade Ndabaningi Sithole, he (Moyo) ran away from Mgagao military camp in Tanzania.
“It is common cause that his uncle Sithole the traitor was being used by the racist Smith regime to block the revolutionary ascendency of Robert Mugabe,” said Mutsvangwa.
The war veterans’ minister said many youths fought and died under the leadership of Mugabe while the “irascible” Moyo wined and dined with the “imperialist war mongers in their elite right wing think tanks plotting to undo the struggle”.
He added, “Now he (Moyo) seeks the protection of the same Mugabe he could not fight for, the same man against whom he scripted excoriations under the tutelage of late Masipula Sithole, another deviant maternal uncle.
“What God has put together let no man put asunder. Jonathan has no business seeing himself as part of political trio in the First Family. Jonathan is too peripheral in Zanu PF to create a faction.”
Moyo left Tanzania to study in the United States during the liberation struggle. He was to return to Zimbabwe where he joined the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) as a political science lecturer before he left to work for the Ford Foundation in Kenya.
While at UZ, Moyo wrote a series of articles in the Financial Gazette and the Parade Magazine attacking President Mugabe and his party.
In 1999, Moyo shocked many when he threw his weight behind Mugabe, then under fire from the civil society for a range of things such the Congo War and the arrest of Standard newspaper editor Mark Chavhunduka and his reporter Ray Choto. Moyo was to be a key member of the Mugabe appointed Constitutional Commission and eventually a cabinet minister under the Zanu PF ticket.
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