Vice- President Joyce Mujuru was behind Operation Murambatsvina, a clean-up exercise that left more than 700 000 people homeless a few months after the 2005 general elections which the Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front had won by a two-thirds majority.
This was alleged by former Information Minister Jonathan Moyo who dismissed reports that Security Minister Didymus Mutasa had master-minded the campaign.
Moyo told United States embassy officials on 5 July 2005 that President Robert Mugabe had been opposed to the operation but could not stop it once it got under way.
According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks the reason behind Murambatsvina was to keep the country off balance “and to keep any internal elements of ZANU-PF from getting sufficiently settled to get purchase on succession objectives”.
He said the idea was to keep the country “lurching from crisis to crisis” but the ruling party had miscalculated the costs of Murambatsvina both politically and economically.
Moyo said Zimbabweans had been “shocked” at the extent to which the government had gone after constituencies on which it historically had relied and many ZANU-PF members, especially party MPs, were made exceedingly uncomfortable by Murambatsvina.
He said the ruling party was going pay a price the next time the electorate went to the polls for its “disastrous” miscalculation.
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