Up to this day, rarely have the rather disturbing similarities between Robert Mugabe’s balding information minister - Jonathan Moyo - and Hitler’s spin doctor - Joseph Goebbels - been probed in detail.

Goebbels, like Moyo, had an unhappy childhood. He was disabled and walked with a limp – although he often tried to disguise it. He had a rather large head, the same as Moyo, whose shoulders slide steeply, making the impression of a jacket thrown on a baobab tree branch. Body language experts suggest this minor physical infirmity bothers Moyo.

Although Goebbels, born 1897, grew up in a lower middle-class family, the same cannot be said of Moyo who was wounded as a child by the constant squabbling between his peasant father and mother, which led them to grow apart.

Goebbels disliked his father because he thought he was mean and often described him as a “bourgeois”. Moyo is said to also despise his father’s treatment of his mother, and there is little contact between them, even today. 

Details of Moyo’s childhood are fuzzy but during the liberation struggle in the early 70s, he was conscripted to the guerrilla movement but later deserted at Mgagawo training camp in Tanzania. Goebbels, always the fiercely patriotic, turned himself in for an army call up but was rejected because of his stooping figure and disability. He cried for days.

After deserting, the trail becomes hard to follow but Moyo, born 1957, emerged at the University of Southern California in America - some say with the help of a white missionary impressed with his sharp brains. He graduated with a degree in Public Administration and later gained his Masters and PhD at the same institution.

Goebbels went to several universities - Bonn was one of them - before gaining his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Heidelberg. The extra-ordinary shaping of Goebbels’ career started while he was doing his thesis for his doctorate

His subject was the examination of the work of Wilhelm von Schutz, subtitled ‘A contribution to the History of the Romantic Drama’. A few years later, Goebbels Nicodemously pulled the thesis from the university archives and renamed it ‘The Spiritual and Political Undercurrents of the Early Romantics’ to imply that his interests were political during his studies, largely to endear himself to Hitler.
Goebbels was evolving a self-consciously assured outlook mixed with considerable vanity. He pursued his education voraciously and precociously to compensate for his physical disability – a result of infantile paralysis at the age of four.

His predilection for avoiding the truth began to show when he was at university and was writing to his girlfriend Else in 1923: “You mustn’t be angry about my not writing, during my holidays, my ink pot has dried out…”
He would say in later years as he assumed the mettle of master of spin: “Propaganda must no investigate the truth objectively (but) it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to its own side.”

He also seemed to have an answer for everything. When confronted about his lateness for a Nazi meeting and his use of a taxi, a symbol of extravagance at the time, Goebbels said: “You don’t know much about propaganda. Taxi, be damned. I should have taken two, not one. The other for my briefcase, don’t forget you have to impress the people. And as for being late, I did that deliberately. I always do. You have got to keep them in suspense.”

Besides reading, Goebbels enjoyed music earlier on in his life – a passion he shares with Moyo who lists listening to classics as one of his favourite hobbies. Moyo has also recorded a CD in Zimbabwe which has been replayed continuously on state radio.

The latter’s interest in the media can be traced back to his impressively articulate articles criticising Mugabe’s government in the early 90s. These were published by Zimbabwe’s intellectual magazines. He also studied radio production in Nairobi, Kenya.

Goebbels first worked as a deputy editor for the right-wing Volkische Freiheit (People’s Freedom) newspaper. He soon found himself talking at public meetings and it is at this point that he is described as becoming agitated to the point of hysteria at any opposition to his views.

When Goebbels met Hitler, it was a case of a failed writer meeting a man who had failed as a painter (Hitler was a keen artist), says Roger Manvell and Heinrich Frankel in their book: Dr Goebbels, His Life and Death. A great deal of these early setbacks, they argue, stayed alive in them both to exacerbate their political temperaments.
For a man who once said Mugabe had an “uncanny propensity to shoot himself in the foot (and) has become a national problem which needs containment”, Moyo’s sudden turn-around to be Mugabe’s cheer leader bears the magnitude of Paul’s conversion in Damascus.

Prior to joining Mugabe’s cabinet, Moyo worked at the Ford Foundation in Kenya where it is alleged he concocted some fantastic project ideas and managed to get millions of dollars but never delivered on the projects. He slipped into South Africa where similar allegations followed at Wits University before being appointed to the Constitutional Commission in 1999, never to return.

After the government’s defeat in the constitutional referendum, observers say Moyo felt that this was a direct challenge on him. His former peers at the University of Zimbabwe like Professor Welshman Ncube had opposed the government constitution. His ego had been punctured and he had to gain revenge, even if it meant going into bed with his arch-enemy, Robert Mugabe.

Although he was a mere spokesman, he stole the limelight by remaining close to journalists with regular nights of free booze which he sponsored. When Mugabe made him his information minister, Moyo’s tune remarkably changed: "Mugabe is someone who accommodates, someone who listens (and) will naturally treat his enemies with understanding."

The history of the two men – Goebbels and Moyo – shows one was a politician and the other could have been driven into politics to shelter himself from possible legal action from his former employers.
What Moyo didn’t have as a politician he has compensated by mastering Goebbels’ art of black propaganda, inevitably drawing comparisons between their information management style which looks strikingly similar to the point of plagiary. SOURCE: Newzimbabwe.com

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