Moyo is our man, says Ndonga Sunday Mirror (Zimb) Date posted:Sun 6-Feb-2005 Date published:Sun 6-Feb-2005
Back to previous page		“At the moment, we are trying to renew our relationship. Zanu PF is failing to understand him" Phillip Chidavaenzi In yet another twist to Information Minister Jonathan Moyo’s political script, lightweight opposition party Zanu, formerly known as Ndonga, is claiming that the spin-doctor cut his political teeth with their party in the 1970s and they were now working towards wooing him back. The party’s Information and Publicity Secretary, Reketayi Semwayo, told The Sunday Mirror last week that their attempts so far to meet Moyo – whose future in Zanu PF and in government is hanging in a balance – have hit a brick wall. “We have been trying to meet him but we are being told that he is not in office and has not been coming to work. The last time we contacted his office, we were given his mobile phone number and when we tried to phone him several times, he was not responding,” Semwayo said. Asked why they had not tried to woo him back earlier on since he left the party before independence in 1980, Semwayo said they had realised now that Moyo would be more at home within Zanu where they understood him better. “At the moment, we are trying to renew our relationship with him because we have discovered that it is only within our party that he can work because Zanu PF is failing to understand him. We are saying to him, come back to your roots,” said Semwayo. Prior to joining Zanu PF ahead of the watershed 2000 parliamentary polls, Moyo, according to sources, had never been Zanu PF. In his CV submitted to the Zanu PF Elections Directorate that was to consider his suitability for standing on the party’s ticket in Tsholotsho, Moyo made a slight reference to his connections with the founder of Zanu Ndonga. “I was raised by my mother who was separated from my father from my birth, and who was very close in the early sixties and mid seventies to the family of the late Reverend (Ndabaningi) Sithole who was at the time the president of Zanu,” Moyo wrote in his CV. Moyo, who was reportedly conscripted into the guerrilla movement as the liberation war of the 1970s gathered momentum, left for Zambia in 1973 and later emerged at Mgagao training camp in Tanzania in 1976 before leaving for the University of California in 1978. His travels, according to sources, where through the assistance of the late Sithole, who broke away from the then Zanu after a misunderstanding with the rest of the leadership. Sources also allege that Moyo was the late Sithole’s personal assistant during the infamous internal settlement deal that saw the emergence of the short-lived Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Moyo’s CV – which left out his role in this deal – was described by Zanu PF National Chairman, John Nkomo, as “a pack of lies” that “no one can take seriously”. “It (the CV) clearly shows that the man was at pains trying to doctor his profile to meet the criteria set out by the party,” Nkomo said. Although Moyo highlighted in his CV that he had “not known any other politics and as a matter of fact... never been part of or associated with any opposition party in post independent Zimbabwe,” neither had he been Zanu PF. Moyo remained anti-Zanu PF during his tenure as lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) during which time he penned a chain of vitriolic, articulate and incisive articles lashing out at the government in several independent magazines. He went as far as describing President Mugabe as a man with “an uncanny propensity to shoot himself in the foot (and) has become a national problem which needs containment”. Semwayo – who will stand in Chipinge North in the March polls – however said the ball was in Moyo’s court to decide whether or not he will return to the party. He said. “We cannot make a judgment for him. It is up to him to return.”