How Jonathan Moyo survived Chiwenga's killers

Professor Jonathan Moyo's escape story from the then Commander Defense  Forces Constantino Chiwenga's killers in November 2017 is a candidate for a Hollywood script.

While Prof Moyo is yet to tell his story in a tell-all book that he is penning, Hagiographer Douglas Rogers takes the readers through a thrilling and breathtaking chilling series of events leading to the escape of Prof Moyo in the eve of a bloody coup that ended 37 years of President Robert Mugabe's iron rule.

The hagiographer packages his narration in a book called Two weeks in November.

Read below the paragraphs detailing the grand escape:

Three miles west of where Magora is hiding in his half-built living room, an SAS unit of between 18 and 25 soldiers storm Jonathan Moyo's house on Rosery Close, Greystone Park. They also go from room to room. Fortunately for Moyo he's already left the premises. He will later tweet pictures of the devastation. The real action – and what Magora might be hearing – is taking place at Saviour's house on Dennys Road, a narrow lane barely a mile up the ridge as the crow flies, where Moyo has taken his family. Their wives and seven children have gone to sleep just after midnight. Moyo stays up with Saviour in his study. They know that a coup is underway and that ZBC has been taken. "We were just wondering how it was all going to play out," said Moyo. At 2:15am they decided to pull up some chairs and take a nap. Fifteen minutes later there was an almighty explosion by the reinforced steel gate. And so it began

Jonathan Moyo is not waiting around any more. At 10pm, he drives himself, his wife and three children from his home in Greystone Park to Saviour's place on Dennys Road. It's a three-mile journey on winding, potholed roads – incredibly, some of the same suburban streets ED and his sons took at about the same time, eight nights before, also in fear of assassination. Moyo arrives safely, soon after 10pm. His yapping dog tweet appears to have worked: he is not followed. Saviour's wife and four children are with him in Dennys Road so there are now 11 of them in the house. Fortunately it's a big place, solidly built, with bulletproof windows. They sit tight and wait.

Again, it's between 18 and 25 troops. They pull up quietly in two armoured vehicles opposite the steel gates. They don't open fire at first. They climb the walls of the property, lined with handsome statues of stone lions, and walk along the top of them, while others soldiers scale the balcony of the neighbour's house to the immediate left, a swooping Art Deco structure.

We know this because watching it all from their bedroom windows two houses away are Shuwa Mudiwa, a former MDC MP, and his son, Tobias, a miner. "They shot from above," says Tobias. "You could see the fire from the guns." The gunfire is accompanied by grenades. Saviour has private security guards but what are they going to do? They drop their weapons and run, scrambling through the tall grass down the slope on the south side of the house and on to El Shaddai Road.

Inside, Saviour and Moyo and their families are cowering in terror, the children screaming, the house shaking, glass shattering. The alarm on the hi-tech security system is an ear-piercing shriek. The soldiers are trying to pry open the sturdy steel gates, but they're remote-controlled and hold fast. At one point, one of the group frantically calls the only people who can help them, the Mugabes. Grace answers and they beg her, "Please save us, Mama!" (Moyo later says it was Grace who called them; that she had heard the neighbourhood gunfire and got word of the other attacks). Either way, Grace tells them she will send help. And then, just like that, after 15 minutes, a strange thing happens: the attack stops. The soldiers lower their weapons, return to their vehicles and drive off. Which is very strange.

They have stormed the Finance Minister's house and detained him; they have stormed Moyo's house but he wasn't in. Here they don't even attempt to enter. Were they just sending a message to Saviour? Had the President or Grace made a frantic call to Chiwenga, begging him to call it off? Twenty minutes later, two vehicles pull up through the mist outside the still smouldering mansion. Grace has heeded the call and sent cars to collect her allies and their families.

She has given the drivers instructions: "You could die in the process but you need to get them." The shaken families pile in and they arrive at the Blue Roof minutes later without mishap. They are not stopped or searched. The wives and children will be sheltered at the Blue Roof for the next week, but for Saviour and Moyo the journey has only just begun. They will soon be in another car, heading east, where – just over a week after mocking ED for being a border jumper – they will cross the same Mozambique border and go into exile.
After escaping to Mozambique with Saviour in November 2017, he had made his way to exile in Nairobi, Kenya, his wife's home country. He was wary the new regime would "do a Kagame" on him – a reference to Rwanda's president who is prone to sending assassins to foreign lands to take out his political opponents. Yet, so far, he was unmolested. He said that on his wife's advice he had taken to wearing a disguise in public: a tweed cap "to cover my egg-shaped head". Afraid or not, it was from Kenya, soon after his arrival, that he began tweeting furiously about the coup being illegal, the country being in the grip of a military junta, and its leaders, chiefly ED and Chiwenga, being murderous "Gukurahundists" – responsible for the Matabeleland massacres in the 1980s