The man who puts the spin on Robert Mugabe's moves is a balding, motor-mouthed political prodigal who once said that the President's "propensity for shooting himself in the foot has become a national problem." Jonathan Moyo, 45, Minister of State for Information, is now top gun in Mugabe's propaganda arsenal and, some say, a future presidential aspirant himself.
Moyo's about-turn on Mugabe, from virulent critic to cheerleader, hasn't earned him many friends. Even in ZANU-PF, Mugabe's own party, he is regarded as an arrogant opportunist. But those who dislike him also fear the ambition that has taken him from being a political outsider to a senior member of the government and a close adviser to Mugabe himself.
Moyo, who has a Ph.D. in political science, was a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe in the 1980s when he began bombarding the local press with letters and articles opposing Mugabe's plans for a one-party state. He wrote a book — Voting for Democracy — on the 1990 election, exposing ZANU-PF's manipulation of the electoral process and calling for legal guarantees for free and fair polls. He also attacked Mugabe's land-acquisition program, which he said risked "politicide" by promising what it couldn't deliver.
Just what prompted Moyo's transformation is unclear. It may have started with disputes about his work for the Ford Foundation in Kenya in the mid-'90s, or a subsequent row over his employment contract with the University of Witwaters-rand in South Africa. In any case, he returned to Zimbabwe in 1999 set on a political career with the ruling party.
He got his chance when Mugabe surprisingly offered him a place on a government constitutional review commission, probably as a critic to give it credibility. Soon he had become not only the commission's main spokesman but its chief salesman. When a national referendum rejected the commission's proposals in 2000, an enraged Moyo took it personally and threw in his lot with Mugabe to become ZANU-PF's campaign manager for the 2000 general election.
Moyo's talent for rhetoric flourished. Opponents of the government, he said, were "plagiarists, sellouts, shameless opportunists and merchants of confusion." Whites were "embittered racists using black mouthpieces to preach meanspirited democracy."
After the election Moyo was awarded a seat in the cabinet and a place in the ruling party's politburo. He has also devised a proposed new law he grandly titles the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which would muzzle the independent press and control the flow of news in and out of Zimbabwe.
Since he came into office he has made it clear that he hates the opposition and the overseas press. He refuses to give interviews to foreign journalists and has ordered several out of the country. "The days of trash journalism in Zimbabwe are numbered," he says. Not long after he publicly denounced the fiercely independent opposition Daily News in Harare, a bomb explosion destroyed the newspaper's presses.
Calling himself "an enlightened liberal," Moyo sees no contradiction between his former life as a champion of democracy and his new role as a scourge of press freedom. The man who once was Mugabe's fiercest critic is now his master's voice.
