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Why is Jonathan Moyo so mad these days?

I was just reading an article by Dumisani Moyo entitled: “From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe: Change without Change? Broadcasting Policy Reform and Political Control.”

It is an old article published in 2004 but nothing much seems to have changed 13 years later.

One quote caught my attention. It said:  “No political party, whether in or out of power, is committed to democracy. In fact, even though they are necessary to its existence, all political parties are by definition enemies of democracy.”

This was from an article by Jonathan Moyo for the Zimbabwe Mirror way back in 1999.

Moyo had not joined mainline politics then.

He did a year later and was appointed Information Minister and overhauled the country’s media making him the country’s de facto Prime Minister.

Even fellow cabinet ministers feared him.

This got me thinking about the current squabble between Moyo and the architects of the “Command Agriculture”, and generally how Moyo has become disgruntled with the newspapers he once controlled.

Why is Moyo so mad? Just for the truth?

I was spared the effort of looking for an answer by unnamed writer in an article carried by News 24.

It goes:

“Who's a command liar then?

“President Robert Mugabe's former spin-doctor Jonathan Moyo is engaged in an unseemly public battle with the state newspapers he once controlled so tightly.

“The architect of Zimbabwe's unpopular press laws, Moyo on Sunday was forced to issue a statement following another attack on him by the Sunday Mail, the sister paper to the daily Herald.

“The Sunday Mail accused Moyo, who is now the minister of higher education, of behaving like ‘an MDC activist’ for criticising Zimbabwe's command agriculture programme when in fact he'd benefited from it, taking state-provided inputs for his wife's farming activities in Mashonaland Central province.

Continued next page

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This post was last modified on March 28, 2017 2:34 pm

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Charles Rukuni

The Insider is a political and business bulletin about Zimbabwe, edited by Charles Rukuni. Founded in 1990, it was a printed 12-page subscription only newsletter until 2003 when Zimbabwe's hyper-inflation made it impossible to continue printing.

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