Letter to the Editor
I do not normally respond to articles about me in the newspapers. I have found in my long career in public life that this seldom serves any purpose and the article in question is usually forgotten in a matter of days anyway. However I see that yesterday, the State media carried on trying to use the story about my recent e mail to the leadership, to ruffle the feathers of the MDC (see Zimbabwe Herald report).
Now I know that the main purpose of the Chronicle and the Herald is to act as the propaganda arm of Zanu PF and I expect that they are unlikely to carry this letter as a response to their recent series related to what I said or did not say. But for my own sake and because the President of the MDC suggested that I attempt to clarify what I said, I write this short response.
Firstly I cannot accept that the Herald obtained my e mail and the response from Kerry Kay from a "leak" within the Party. My e mail was sent to five members of our leadership - the President, the Secretary General, the Treasurer and the National Spokesperson as well as Mrs. Kerry Kay, a member of our National Executive. Not one of these individuals would have, under any circumstances, leaked an e mail of this nature to the State controlled media. I must therefore assume that these were routine intercepts of our e mails by State Security Agents and note this with interest and will make sure to use other means for communications of this nature in future.
However, I know full well that anything you put out on the Web can and will be distributed and therefore I never put anything out there that I do not want read or feel that it would do damage if it became public. I write a weekly analysis of affairs in Zimbabwe and this gets very wide distribution.
Then there is the issue of what I said at the rally in Bulawayo last weekend. What I did was to greet the several thousand people there (ZBC said it was a small crowd) and then said in Ndebele that Tsvangirai was the "Boss" - you could interpret this as saying he was "my boss". Now the word I used is one that I have been called since I was two years old - its traditional use was as "Lord" or "King". Clearly I am neither, so in my world, the term simply means "boss", the man in charge. The Herald says I was worshipping him, the Chronicle (better Ndebele) said I called him "my King". Then they went on to say that I was two faced - my e mails criticized the President and said that the MDC was falling apart (both true).