The Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front cannot be reformed from within or outside because it is inherently against reform, former Higher Education Minister Jonathan Moyo says.
“My view now is that ZANU-PF needs to be removed and replaced in the national interests. And for the avoidance of doubt, I’m done with ZANU-PF. In any event, ZANU-PF is now a party of the past. The writing is on the wall,” he told Alex Magaisa in an interview.
Moyo said he joined politics to understand former President Robert Mugabe and current President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
He, however, did not believe that there are significant commonalities between the two.
“I do not agree that there are important or significant commonalities between Mugabe and Mnangagwa,” he said.
“The fact is that President Mugabe is a founding leader of country together with the late VP Joshua Nkomo. Founding leaders get a special dispensation.
“I don’t consider Mnangagwa a founding leader. I don’t put him where I put Nkomo and Mugabe. No. So the proposition that there are commonalities between Mugabe and Mnangagwa has no historical basis.”
Below is an excerpt from the interview:
BSR: An interesting feature of your career is that both your admirers and enemies have given you credit or accused you of going into ZANU PF in order to destroy it from within. Maybe “destroy from within” sounds too negative. No-one could have expected you to confirm this during your time in ZANU PF. Some think this can’t be true because without your input ZANU PF might never have survived the force of the opposition in the 2000s. Can you settle this?
ANSWER: I’m not sure that there’s an issue to settle here. But, as a matter of fact, I have never ever contemplated destroying Zanu PF from within, not least because such a mission would have been impossible as something megalomaniacally stupid in the extreme. What I wanted to do, and said as much about it on many occasions, was that I wanted to reform Zanu PF from within. I regretted that my leading role in the fight against the one-party state debate did not result in the reform of Zanu PF. Rather, it resulted in Zanu PF balking at legislating for a one-party state but becoming a de facto one-party state. I have said on many previous occasions that this happened because the one-party state debate sought to reform Zanu PF from outside its ranks. If the debate had been led from inside Zanu PF, the situation would have most probably been different. I give this only as an example of what I meant by the position that Zanu PF could only be reformed from within.
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