Zimbabwean journalist and European Union-blacklisted University of Botswana lecturer, Caesar Zvayi, fought back tears and pleaded: “You people don’t understand”, when police came to pick him up from his campus residence on Friday afternoon.
The tough talking former Herald Editor cut a sorry figure as his bags were being loaded into a police van before he was driven away.
Zvayi, who was Robert Mugabe’s propagandist, however, still managed to turn on his propaganda offensive and have his deportation leaked to the media with his spin on it.
The Zimbabwean government media, the Herald, however, claimed the story was leaked by the Botswana government as a publicity stunt.
Controversial Zimbabwean priest, Edmund Chaka, who fleeced a lot of HIV positive Batswana allegedly sending them to an early grave with his claims that he could cure the disease, was also deported on Friday. The priest, who established Abundant Life Ministries in Botswana, was deported after a number of HIV positive Batswana died allegedly because he convinced them to stop taking their ARV medication and, instead, substitute it with his concoction.
Government spokesperson, Jeff Ramsay, confirmed the deportations on Saturday morning.
Zvayi was given his contract termination letter on Thursday night by the Head of the Media Studies Department, Professor David Kerr. Last week Kerr had indicated that Zvayi’s ideology was “an issue of concern”.
The university finally succumbed to pressure after all students taking Writing for Print and News Writing and Reporting 1 in the university’s Faculty of Communications and Media. Started boycotting his lectures in protest after Metro broke the story two weeks ago.
Students at the university were set to be joined by Zimbabweans residing in Gaborone to stage a protest at the campus on Monday. Anti-Mugabe sentiments are particularly strong among Botswana citizens and the Botswana government has taken a particular hard line stance against Mugabe.
The development comes as reports say students at the University of Zimbabwe are augmenting their lecturers’┬ásalaries. Zvayi could have stood to earn more than 15000 Pula a month as a lecturer at the University of Botswana, a salary a full professor at any university in Zimbabwe could only dream of.
Zvayi has, in the past, openly called for the alienation of the opposition and celebrated the violent crackdown on the opposition in that country. He is well known for bastardizing the MDC acronym to mean Movement for the Destruction of our Country, sometimes with the ascetic ‘movement’ for ‘morons’. Last year, he used a racial slur against the US Ambassador calling him a “house Ni***r”.
Zvayi, alongside Sunday Mail’s Munyaradzi Huni, became the first journalist to be added to the European Union travel restrictions on Zimbabwe.
He is accused of propagating hate speech in an updated list of 37 individuals and 4 ‘entities’ under a visa ban and assets freeze. They are accused of whipping up support during a state sponsored terror campaign during and after the June 29 controversial run off election.
