Senior minister confirms Baba Jukwa identity

After two weeks of exposés and counter exposés, the minister forwarded to several private news media an email from “Hacking Team, Sydney, Australia” that claims to have hacked Baba Jukwa’s email and traced it to the Sunday Mail journalist. The minister, who requested anonymity saying “We investigating internally and I might get hurt”, has promised to divulge further details in due course.

The battle to out the Zanu (PF) mole, who rose to instant fame with his eye-popping revelations on Facebook about behind-the-scenes machinations within the party in the months before the July 2013 elections, intensified two weeks ago.

The train of events makes it evident that some in high places are using this saga to settle political scores. The opening salvo was fired by faceless hackers who claimed to have been working with the Central Intelligence Organisation to crack the cyber defences erected by the Facebook sensation.

The story broke on Saturday May 10 when newzimbabwe.com – a UK-based website widely suspected of being a CIO project – published a story alleging that two South African-based journalists Mxolisi Ncube and Mkhululi Chimoio were behind the Baba Jukwa persona.

The two have denied the allegations and have retained legal counsel to clear their names. This was swiftly followed by an article in the Sunday Mail purporting to make all sorts of revelations about Baba Jukwa – although all the details “revealed” had been published on his Facebook page a year ago.

This was accompanied by a statement from Information Minister Jonathan Moyo – which also appeared on newzimbabwe.com on Sunday 11 – ominously suggesting that the law enforcement agencies should take action against the two journalists. The Herald jumped onto the bandwagon on Monday with a screaming headline “Baba Jukwa confesses”. However no such confession was even mentioned in the article, which simply regurgitated much of the Sunday Mail content and previous Baba Jukwa content.

This continued every day and by the end of the week The Herald was almost hysterical in its demands that the security forces should act or be suspected of conniving with Baba Jukwa in “insulting General Constantine Chiwenga” – the head of the defence forces. Last Thursday this newspaper reported that a senior staffer at the Sunday Mail was behind the stories after impeccable sources revealed that he was working with senior politicians in Zanu (PF) and intelligence agents to fight a factional war ahead of the party’s elective congress this year.