I ended up with another quote which said: “Propaganda is as powerful as heroin; it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think.”
Eight days before the elections, I wrote another piece, on what I thought about Baba Jukwa. I felt that Baba Jukwa would come out or disappear shortly after the elections because his job would have been done. We all know what happened.
I also argued that Baba Jukwa could not be Shona, as one media outlet reported, but someone who had a knowledge of Zulu because the jika as used by Baba Jukwa made sense only in Zulu and not in Ndebele.
Baba Jukwa had more than 400 000 likes before killing himself off. Of course the death was not sudden. Some young people were implicated as being behind the facebook character with Sunday Mail editor Edmund Kudzayi being arrested only to be released months later.
The job had been done and the character was laid to rest.
Then came Jonathan Moyo almost a year later, using almost the same modus operandi like Baba Jukwa, but this time on twitter. Though twitter is not as popular as facebook, Moyo has managed to amass 108 000 followers in 23 months. This is a remarkable fit because facebook has about 1.6 billion users while twitter has just over 300 million.
Moyo has successfully used twitter to maintain the high profile he had as Information Minister when most people thought he would fade out as they viewed his transfer to Higher Education was a demotion.
He has actually raised the profile of the Higher Education ministry which now grossly overshadows that of the Ministry of Information.
But what has been most striking for me has been his persistent attacks on Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa. I thought these two were close, or at least shared one common political goal. I don’t buy Moyo’s “one centre of power” argument because he would not have been involved in the Tsholotsho meeting of 2004.
I could be wrong, but I am just asking, if Jonathan Moyo is not a member of the G40 faction as he has persistently argued on his twitter handle- saying G40 is not a political faction but a demographic group, who is he really with?
He claims to be with Mugabe, but apart from Grace, who is really still with the old man? He can’t play second fiddle to Kasukuwere!
If he is not a lone ranger, could he be doing to Mnangagwa what Baba Jukwa was doing to Mugabe and ZANU-PF?
It is difficult to tell as it now seems it’s dog eat dog’s as ZANU-PF members seek to position themselves for the Old Man’s eventual departure.
Ed: Starting tomorrow, What Wikileaks said about Jonathan Moyo
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