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(NEWZIMBABWE) Moyo throws his lot with Zanu PF

Moyo throws his lot with Zanu PF
by Lebo Nkatazo
18/09/2009 00:00:00

JONATHAN Moyo will throw his lot with Zanu PF in his biggest political gamble yet. The Tsholotsho North MP, the only independent in Zimbabwe’s parliament, has held discussions with senior Zanu PF officials and is expected to be readmitted into the party he quit in 2005 within days.

Moyo’s bid to be readmitted to Zanu PF has the support of senior officials including secretary for administration and Defence Minister Didymus Mutasa, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa and President Robert Mugabe, sources say.

Moyo declined to comment on the developments this week, but a senior Zanu PF official familiar with moves to readmit him said: “Politics is not religion … it’s not like he’s a Muslim converting to Christianity. Politics is much simpler than that.”

The former Information Minister is ready to face down his opponents in Zanu PF who will try to block his readmission at a politburo meeting, led by Zanu PF national chairman John Nkomo.

From accusing Vice President Joice Mujuru of “crisscrossing the country in the glare of the media hoping to win voters by waving a pigs-and-chicken manifesto in an economy whose wheels have fallen off” to publicly stating that “Mugabe’s leadership has become inherently limited and in fact doomed to fail”, Moyo has accumulated enough enemies in Zanu PF to make his re-entry an unpredictable affair.

But leading Zanu PF figures feel the party has failed to coherently put its message across since Moyo quit after his bid to run for MP in Tsholotsho was blocked in February 2005. At the time, Mugabe revealed that he had spent two hours, along with Mujuru, trying to persuade Moyo to stay.

Despite a dalliance with the Morgan Tsvangirai-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the 2008 parliamentary elections which saw the party not challenging Moyo, there was never a danger of the former university lecturer joining the party, friends say.

Moyo’s latest move is said to have incensed MDC officials, but that will unlikely bother the 52-year-old whose political career has been built on controversy.

A friend said: “His view is that why is it OK for Morgan Tsvangirai to work with Mugabe and such a bad idea for Jonathan Moyo to do the same? The fact is things have changed, that's why Tsvangirai sits in Cabinet with Mugabe and that's why it's a good time for Moyo to go back to the party which truly represents his politics.”

Labels: JONATHAN MOYO, ZANU-PF

posted by MrK @ 5:37 PM