FORMER Mines Minister and top Zanu PF official Obert Mpofu says he acquired his wealth through hard work and has challenged anyone convinced his riches were ill-gotten to take the evidence to the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC).
Mpofu was responding to a heated exchange on Twitter with Zimbabweans on how he became a rich politician in Zimbabwe amid allegations that he used his immense influence when he was Mines Minister at the height of the lucrative Chiadzwa diamond mining era, to accumulate his riches.
The Zanu PF secretary for administration and Politburo member said hard work is narrowly linked to theft and sorcery as if it is criminal for a black man to prosper on plain merit.
He has just come out of self-isolation at his Nyamandlovu farm in Matabeleland North after travelling to Tanzania for a conference as a Zanu PF delegate and took the mandatory Covid-19 quarantine.
Moyo has a vast business empire with interests in mining, security, farming, tourism and transport. He once operated a daily newspaper and a bank which have both collapsed.
Most depositors are still to recover their money from the bank.
In 2018, he made headlines when he declined to give oral evidence to the Mines Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on what happened to an estimated US$15 billion diamond proceeds that vanished during his time as Mines Minister.
“It is as if there is an unwritten law that once you are in political leadership, you must wallow in poverty,” Mpofu said.
“Such luciferous misrepresentations only flourish in polarised political spaces where propaganda is abused to assert divisions among our people.
“The discourse of corruption is peddled to manipulate gullible minds to hating their leaders. The issue of corruption in high places has emotive capital. It even becomes worse when it is used to decapitate reputations of those of us in power,” he charged.
Mpofu said it was surprising those who accused him of corruption have not approached the anti-corruption body, ZACC, with evidence for him to be investigated.
“Those who were in Zanu PF and accused me of corruption where they are and where am I now? What evidence have they produced to a whole ZACC. The correct question should not be, why me? It should be why us?” he said.
