News24
19/12/2005 14:28 - (SA)
Harare - Power outages blacked
out most of the township of
Chitungwiza, including an already ailing
industrial district south of the
capital, and may last for up to three
weeks, Zimbabwe state media reported
Monday.
A lightning
strike hit a main power facility Sunday in the
dormitory township of half a
million people, 25km from Harare, causing a
fire that destroyed a
transformer station, state radio said.
James Maridadi, a
spokesman for the state power company, said
power to some areas could be
restored within a week. Full repairs would be
completed within 21 days, he
said.
The fire blazed for about six hours after firefighters
had to be
called in from Harare, bringing their own
water.
Chitungwiza's own fire trucks were broken down and its
fire
hydrants were dry, Maridadi said.
The township,
along with most other urban areas in Zimbabwe, has
suffered regular and
lengthy power and water outages as the nation suffers
its worst economic
crisis since independence in 1980, with spiraling
inflation of 502% and
acute shortages of hard currency, gasoline, imported
equipment and spare
parts.
The magistrate's courts in Chitungwiza have been
closed several
times this year by utility outages. In Harare, police and
prison authorities
postponed cases, saying they did not have enough fuel to
take suspects to
court.
Earlier this month, a state of
the nation broadcast by President
Robert Mugabe was blacked out for half an
hour by a power outage.
Maridadi told state radio Monday
power outages were worsened by
the theft of oil used in small, local relay
stations that was then sold on
the back market in the fuel-starved nation.
At last 40 such stations in
Harare were out of action, some irreparably
damaged after being drained of
oil.
UN News Centre
19 December 2005 - The top United Nations
humanitarian relief official today
pleaded for the Security Council to take
urgent political and security
measures to stem crises resurgent in Darfur,
south Sudan, Zimbabwe and other
parts of Africa, so that humanitarian
efforts will not be overwhelmed by
violence and Governmental
problems.
"Humanitarian aid cannot be an alibi for unwillingness to
address the root
causes of conflict," said Jan Egeland, UN Humanitarian
Relief Coordinator.
"The greatest contribution we can make to addressing
humanitarian crises in
Africa is determined, energetic and sustained efforts
to bring an end to
conflict and injustice that cause so much suffering in
Africa."
In Darfur in particular, he said, 13,000 international and
national relief
workers are assisting more than 3 million people in that
region and Chad
under constant threat, while they are witnessing a terrible
reality on the
ground -- killing, rape, burning, looting and forced
displacement.
"It cannot be right that we have twice as many humanitarian
workers in
Darfur as international security personnel," he said, urging an
expanded
security presence on the ground. "So I appeal to you very strongly
to show
the sense of urgency and determination needed to achieve the
objectives
identified in your resolutions and help bring this crisis to an
end."
He also urged that the Council deal with the growing devastation by
the
Ugandan Rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in south Sudan, Uganda and
the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), who are not only attacking local
people and refugees and cutting off humanitarian access to them, but are
also targeting humanitarian workers.
The Council must, he said insist
on an immediate cessation of LRA violence
and an end to all sources of
support to the group. He also called for the
convening of an expert panel to
decide how the Council could most
effectively eliminate its
threat.
In sourthern Africa, Mr. Egeland focused on the situation in
Zimbabwe, where
almost one third the population will require food assistance
this year,
basic services continue to deteriorate and the Government's
recent urban
eviction campaign was "the worst possible action, at the worst
possible
time."
In that situation as well, he stressed it was not
sustainable to keep
providing food assistance for millions of people year
after year without
addressing the causes.
"From my discussions with
the Government of Zimbabwe, I am convinced that
the UN and the humanitarian
community at large must try to engage more
actively with the
Government."
In addition, he said, there needed to be much more
investment in sustainable
food security, livelihoods and basic services in
Zimbabwe and other parts of
Africa.
"I call upon all Member States to
live up to their commitments to fund,
support and facilitate a much more
ambitious development and humanitarian
agenda," he said.
Bloomberg
Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- U.K. multimillionaire Nicholas van
Hoogstraten
ordered ``thugs'' to murder business rival Mohammed Raja in
1999, a London
court ruled, boosting a bid by Raja's family to recover civil
damages for
his death.
Van Hoogstraten was convicted of
manslaughter in 2002 for his role in
Raja's murder after hiring two men to
`teach Raja a lesson.' The U.K. Court
of Appeal quashed that conviction in
July 2003 on the grounds the jury
hearing the case had been misdirected,
freeing the property tycoon from a
10-year prison sentence.
The
High Court in London today ruled that, for the purpose of civil
lawsuits
brought by Raja's relatives, the evidence was ``overwhelming'' that
Van
Hoogstraten had recruited the men to kill Raja, rather than to
intimidate
him. At the time of his death, Raja was suing Van Hoogstraten for
around 5
million pounds ($8.8 million) for fraud.
``Nothing less than murder
would rid Mr. Van Hoogstraten of this thorn
in his flesh,'' Justice Gavin
Lightman said in the judgment. ``He clearly
recruited the thugs to `break'
the thorn and resolve for good his problems
with Mr. Raja.''
Robert Knapp and David Croke, Van Hoogstraten's alleged hitmen, were
found
guilty of Raja's murder in July 2002 and are serving life terms in
prison.
Damages
``Mr. Hoogstraten is revealed in
the judgment as an utterly dishonest
and ruthless criminal with no regard
for other people, the truth or the
law,'' Peter Irvin, a lawyer for the Raja
family, said today in documents
submitted to the court.
Van
Hoogstraten, who has extensive property holdings in Britain and
Zimbabwe, is
worth around 500 million pounds, according to a Dec. 13 report
by
London-based newspaper The Evening Standard. He wasn't present or legally
represented during the hearing and denies ever hiring Knapp or Croke to
commit the murder.
Raja's relatives have filed four civil
actions against him at the High
Court, seeking to recover millions of pounds
in damages for his death.
The cases, which are being heard
together, will return to the court
next month, with a final judgment on any
damages to be awarded expected
later next year.
Van Hoogstraten
was ordered to pay 500,000 pounds in interim legal
costs to the Raja family
within 14 days.
`Uphill Struggle'
``Naturally, we are
very pleased with the court's findings, but it has
been a devastating and
uphill struggle to get here,'' the family said in a
statement released after
the decision.
Justice Lightman said in the judgment that police
couldn't identify
any other person who would have a motive to kill Raja and
that his death had
``the hallmarks of a contract killing.''
Van
Hoogstraten has a series of criminal convictions dating back to
1956,
including theft, criminal damage by explosion, corrupting a police
officer
and assault.
``He has proudly acknowledged on television that he
associates with
violent criminals,'' Lightman said. ``He has publicly stated
that in dealing
with people who get in his way he goes for direct
retribution.''
The case is Raja v. Van Hoogstraten CH 1993 R
6492.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Megan Murphy in
London at mmurphy41@bloomberg.net.
Last
Updated: December 19, 2005 11:51 EST
Zim Online
Tue 20 December
2005
HARARE - Veteran Zimbabwe radio broadcaster and Voice of the
People
(VOP) executive director John Masuku was on Monday arrested by the
police
for allegedly breaching the country's tough broadcasting
laws.
Masuku and VOP board chairman David Masunda, who were in
hiding since
last Thursday when the police raided the independent radio
station's offices
in Harare, handed themselves over to the law enforcement
agency on Monday.
VOP lawyer Rangu Nyamurundira
said the police last night insisted on
detaining Masuku overnight after
searching the company's offices. The police
also confiscated computers and
Masuku's laptop during the search.
Nyamurundira said: "Police have
detained Masuku and released Masunda
after searching the company's offices.
They took with them Masuku's laptop
and computers."
The lawyer
said it was still not clear last night under which section
of the law Masuku
would be charged but hinted that he could be charged under
Section 27 of the
Broadcasting Services Act which makes it an offence to
broadcast without a
licence from the state Broadcasting Authority of
Zimbabwe
(BAZ).
Masuku faces up to two years in jail if convicted of
breaching the
tough broadcasting law.
"At this stage, it is not
clear what charges they will bring against
him but they hinted that they
might consider charging him for operating a
radio station without permission
from the broadcasting authority,"
Nyamurundira said.
"We will
insist that they bring him to court tomorrow (Tuesday) but
the problem is
that police are arresting people for the purposes of
conducting
investigations which is wrong procedurally," he said.
Masuku's
arrest comes as the police earlier in the day released three
journalists -
Maria Nyanyiwa, Nyasha Bosha and Kundai Mugwanda - who were
arrested last
Thursday for flouting the country's broadcasting laws.
The
journalists were released without charge after the police
indicated that
they could not be charged for operating a radio station
without a licence as
they were not owners of VOP.
Under Zimbabwe's broadcasting Act, it
is illegal for Zimbabweans to
own signal transmitting equipment or to
broadcast from the country without
first seeking permission from the
BAZ.
But VOP does not broadcast from Zimbabwe although it maintains
offices
and reporters in the country. The station broadcasts into Zimbabwe
from a
Radio Netherlands transmitter off the Indian ocean island of
Madagascar.
The arrest of the journalists comes barely a week after
Information
Minister Tichaona Jokonya threatened to crack the whip against
journalists
whom he accused of serving foreign interests.
At
least four newspapers have been shut down in the last three years
for
flouting the country's tough media laws. The United States based
Committee
to Protect Journalists ranks Zimbabwe among the three worst
countries for
journalists. The other two are Iran and the former Soviet
republic of
Uzbekistan. - ZimOnline
Zim Online
Tue 20 December 2005
HARARE - Inside this vast air
conditioned banking hall in Harare's
central business district, is a giant
television screen which is
strategically located to draw the attention of
the bank's clients.
Every few seconds, the "captive audience" in
the queue which snakes
for some 12 metres, is bombarded with the bank's
commercials telling them
why doing business with this particular bank was
the best decision they ever
made.
But in this queue are
individuals wearing exhausted faces, tired from
the daily grind of eking a
living in Zimbabwe's troubled economy.
For most of the people in
the queue, each visit to the bank appears to
be a real test of endurance on
its own as lifeless and visibly bored bank
tellers take their sweet time
counting the huge "bricks" of Z$20 000 bearer
cheques and Z$1 000
notes.
This is happening in an economy where coins have virtually
been phased
out. The bearer cheques - they are not real money and many of
the cheques
expired a long time ago but they still work just like real cash
- were
introduced by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe three years ago as a stop
gap
measure in a bid to end severe cash shortages in the
country.
For James Tsodzo, a 45-year old clerk in Harare, each
visit to the
bank has provided challenges unthinkable only a few years back.
Tsodzo says
with the rapid depreciation of the Zimbabwe dollar, he has had
to carry
along a satchel to carry the huge wads of cash whenever he goes to
the bank
to withdraw money.
"You see this bag," said Tsodzo
pointing at the satchel behind his
back. "It is specifically for carrying
just $5 million which is my net
salary. It is embarrassing for us to be
carrying bags to stuff in money. We
are exposing ourselves to thieves," he
said.
Touched by the subject under discussion, a woman who was also
in the
queue quickly joined in.
"I had to hire a taxi to assist
me in carrying the $10 million I want
to withdraw. I am not sure what notes
they will give me so I just decided to
play it safe, carry the bag and jump
in a cab. It's unthinkable that things
have really become this bad," the
woman said.
The Zimbabwe dollar, which was stronger than the United
States dollar
at independence from Britain 25 years ago, has shed most of
its value since
November 1997 when the dollar crashed on the market after
President Robert
Mugabe curved in to pressure from war veterans and awarded
them Z$50 000
gratuities in recognition of their role during Zimbabwe's
1970s war of
independence.
The Zimbabwe dollar has been on a
free-fall since then. The economic
situation worsened after the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) withdrew
balance-of-payment support to
Harare in 1999 after differing with Mugabe
over fiscal policy and other
governance issues.
Mugabe's chaotic and violent seizure of
white-owned farms for
redistribution to landless blacks, which he launched a
year after the IMF
pulled out, only helped exacerbate Zimbabwe's economic
collapse described by
the World Bank as unprecedented for a country not at
war.
Inflation currently stands at 502.4 percent. Food, fuel,
essential
medical drugs are all in critical short supply because there is no
hard cash
to import the commodities.
The main opposition blames
Mugabe for ruining what was once one of
Africa's success stories. But Mugabe
denies the charge blaming the economic
crisis on sabotage by Britain and its
allies whom he says were not happy
with his land seizure
programme.
But like the Germans under the Weimar Republic in the
1920s who had to
carry wads of cash in wheelbarrows only to return with the
goods in plastic
bags, Zimbabweans are carrying millions of dollars in
satchels.
"The quantity of money we bank everyday is not congruent
with the
value. It is just too many notes worth very little. The government
must do
something about this," said an attendant at a mobile phone shop in
the city.
Most shops in Harare have been forced to acquire cash
counters due to
the massive amounts of cash they have to handle during
transactions.
Mrs Adams, an Indian businesswoman in downtown
Harare, said she had to
buy a money counter due to the huge amounts of cash
they were handling.
"If someone wants to buy a 5kg packet of sugar
which costs $500 000
for instance, and they bring $1 000 notes which are
being issued at most
banks, it means you will need to count 500 of these
notes and this takes
time," she said.
Even the workers are
moving around with bags on pay days to stuff in
their million-dollar
salaries which however are not enough to last a month.
An average worker in
Zimbabwe earns Z$3 million every month while the
Consumer Council of
Zimbabwe says an average family of two parents and four
children need Z$11.9
million every month to survive.
"Each of my workers now brings a
small bag every Friday to carry their
earnings home because you cannot fit
it in the pocket," Adams said. -
ZimOnline
Zim Online
Tue 20 December 2005
CHIREDZI - Jowaki Chauke's dream of
becoming a sugarcane farmer
appeared well set to become reality when the
government land committee
allocated him a plot on one of Zimbabwe's prime
sugar estates in the
country's south-eastern lowveld.
But 15
months down the line, the sweet dream is gradually
disintegrating into a
nightmare not only for Chauke but for many of the 180
black villagers given
land for free on the giant Mkwasine Estates under the
government's
controversial land redistribution exercise.
Mkwasine belonged to
two South African-owned firms, Hippo Valley and
Triangle Limited and was one
of Zimbabwe's biggest sugar estates, producing
up to 850 000 of sugarcane
before it was seized by the government - together
with sugar crop that was
on it - and divided amongst Chauke and his fellow
villagers.
But ask Chauke or anyone of his fellow sugar farmers here at Mkwasine
and
they will tell you that while the gift of free land and sugar was most
welcome, it would have been better had government land officers done a
little planning and above all ensured that the beneficiaries would be
allocated enough space on the sugar plots to build homes.
"It
could have been better for us had these areas been demarcated in
such a
manner to allow us to build homes," bemoans Chauke, who was given 20
hectares of prime sugar growing land at Mkwasine.
A father of
three children, Chauke added: "I do not mean to be
ungrateful to our
government, but I do not know how they expected things to
work out when they
gave us land to grow cane without space to build homes."
In yet
another vivid illustration of the chaos and shoddy planning
that
characterised President Robert Mugabe's controversial land reform
programme,
government land planners demarcated Mkwasine into fine sugar
plots.
But for some strange reason the government land planners
decided to
leave not even one inch of land on which the newly resettled
farmers could
build homes!
Agricultural experts meanwhile say
the compulsory acquisition and
subsequent subdivision of Mkwasine Estate by
the government was done in a
manner bound to weigh down heavily on
production.
The composite estate was parcelled out into uneconomic
units that
according to top agro-economist and main opposition Movement for
Democratic
Change party politician Renson Gasela cannot be economically
cultivated.
Gasela, who is a former chief executive of the
government's Grain
Marketing Board, said: "The allocation was done in such a
way that the
fields for the new farmers are dotted about making any
centralised operation
impossible. This is done deliberately to make
everybody fail. Otherwise why
would the government allocate land in this
manner?"
The opposition politician said Mkwasine Estate was
developed as one
unit comprising a network of fields, canals and dams for
one owner.
"Apportioning land to multiple owners has proved uneconomic," he
added.
About 2 700 hectares have so far been allocated to 180 new
farmers but
half the beneficiaries have since deserted their plots while
some have left
them under the care of relatives and friends.
But even for those farmers like Chauke who are determined to stick it
out
and remain on the land to grown sugar - the odds are increasingly
looking
insurmountable.
For example, Chauke's neighbour, Tauzeni
Mhlanguleni, says his cane
has overgrown and will soon be worthless because
he has no money to hire
additional labour to help reap the
cane.
"We cannot afford the wages," said Mhlanguleni, adding that
his most
important lesson in the past 15 months at Mkwasine has been that
sugarcane
growing is both a capital and labour intensive
project.
"We have exhausted the initial government loans but have
little to
show for it after the state deducted from our first earnings all
what we
owed them," said Mhlanguleni.
And just to compound the
despairing Mhlanguleni's problems are the
fuel shortages gripping Zimbabwe
which means that even if he eventually gets
to cut his cane, it might still
rot on his hands because he has no fuel to
transport it to the mill about
65km away.
A cursory glance at the statistics provides a good
insight on how the
government's land reform exercise has been in this
particular instance, a
giant leap backwards.
The figures show
that just about a year ago, Mkwasine under its former
owners produced 110
tonnes of sugarcane per hectare. Today, Chauke and his
colleagues can only
manage 40 tonnes of poor quality cane pre hectare - a
yield not enough to
cover the costs of transporting the cane to the mills
let alone the cost of
fertilizers and other chemicals.
"It is obvious that the future of
the farmers, without sufficient
capital, without equipment, with no
experience and working individually, is
bleak," Gasela said.
"The government is set to destroy the sugar industry just as they have
done
with tobacco, maize, wheat, beef, dairy, horticulture," he added.
It would be easy to dismiss Gasela's predictions as the typical
ranting of
an opposition politician were it not Mugabe himself who admitted
just as
much during the conference of his ruling ZANU PF party earlier this
month.
Mugabe - who has defended his chaotic and often violent
land reforms
as having been necessary to ensure blacks who were previously
denied arable
land by previous white rulers also owned land - told the ZANU
PF conference
that poor planning and corruption in the land reform exercise
had
contributed to food shortages in the country.
Zimbabwe has
largely survived on food handouts from international
donors since the
government's land reforms destabilised the agricultural
sector, knocking
down food production by about 60 percent. An estimated
three million people
or a quarter of the country's 12 million Zimbabweans
require more than a
million tonnes of food aid between now and the next
harvest around
March/April 2006 or they will starve.
But Mkwasine with its
homeless and broke sugar farmers could be the
most eloquent testimony yet to
as what has gone wrong with Harare's
controversial land redistribution plan.
- ZimOnline
Zim Online
Mon 19 December
2005
HARARE - Zimbabwe police on Monday morning released without
charge
three journalists of the private Voice of the People (VOP) radio
station who
were arrested last Thursday for allegedly breaching the
country's tough
broadcasting laws.
A lawyer representing the
journalists, Jacob Mafume, told ZimOnline on
Monday that his clients were
released after the police realised that they
could not charge them as they
were not the owners of the radio station.
Mafume said: "They have
been released without charge but police are
still looking for the directors
of VOP."
TICHAONA Jokonya . . . threatened tough action against
journalists
Police last Thursday raided the VOP offices in
Harare and arrested the
three - Maria Nyanyiwa, Nyasha Bosha and Kundai
Mugwanda - whom they accused
of flouting the country's tough Broadcasting
Services Act.
Under Zimbabwe's tough broadcasting laws, it is
illegal for
Zimbabweans to own signal transmitting equipment or to broadcast
from the
country without first seeking permission from the Broadcasting
Authority of
Zimbabwe.
VOP does not broadcast from Zimbabwe
although it maintains offices and
reporters in the country. The station
broadcasts into Zimbabwe from a Radio
Netherlands transmitter off the Indian
ocean island of Madagascar.
The arrest of the three journalists
came a few days after Zimbabwe
Information Minister Tichaona Jokonya
threatened to clamp down on
independent journalists whom he accused of
serving a foreign agenda.
But in an affidavit last Friday, Mafume
said the police had indicated
to him that they were not going to release the
journalists until VOP
director David Masunda handed himself over to the law
enforcement agency.
More than a hundred journalists have been
arrested over the past three
years for flouting the country's tough media
laws. Four independent
newspapers including the country's biggest daily, The
Daily News, have also
been banned during the same period as President Robert
Mugabe's government
tightened the noose on independent media.
The United States-based press rights watchdog Committee to Protect
Journalists ranks Zimbabwe among the three worst places for journalists. The
other two are Iran and the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. -
ZimOnline
[This report
does not necessarily reflect the views of the United
Nations]
JOHANNESBURG, 19 December (IRIN) - The volume of food aid and
agricultural
inputs being shipped to those in need in Southern Africa has
resulted in
bottlenecks as transporters struggle to cope.
This has
impacted on the World Food Programme's (WFP) ability to preposition
stocks
ahead of the rainy season in Zambia, one of six countries in the
region
facing shortages.
The agency said in its latest situation report that its
Zambia operation was
still experiencing food supply problems due to ongoing
transport delays and
the slow arrival of food from South Africa. WFP said
the number of people
requiring food assistance in Zambia was likely to rise
above 1.2 million.
"Loading capacity in South Africa, along with regional
competition for
transport needed to deliver food and other inputs, has
seriously delayed
deliveries and compromised WFP's ability to preposition
food before the
onset of the rains," the report noted.
Some
commodities had to be diverted and shipped from South Africa's main
port
city, Durban, to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and Beira in Mozambique,
from
where they were being transported to Malawi and Zambia, WFP spokeswoman
Stephanie Savariaud told IRIN.
Although there have been fuel
shortages in South Africa over the past two
weeks, this had not yet affected
WFP's operations, she added.
"There was a lot of [aid] traffic, and
because of the volume of fertiliser
and seeds being transported it created a
bottleneck. The food corridor for
Malawi has to go through Zimbabwe, where
there's also a fuel shortage, but
it was less of an issue than the
[quantity] of fertiliser and seeds. We had
to find other options," she
said.
The options included contracting trucks to return to South Africa
without a
load so as to increase turnaround times, but "the situation has
now eased",
Savariaud added.
Some 12 million people, mainly in
Zimbabwe and Malawi, are in need of
emergency food assistance due to failed
harvests.
South Africa, however, has had a bumper crop of 12.4 million mt
of cereals,
resulting in an estimated potential export surplus of about 4.66
million
mt - more than enough to cover the region's import requirements,
according
to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
[ENDS]
Comment from The Cape Times (SA), 19 December
By Peter
Fabricius
Two pictures in the Kuala Lumpur papers last week told an
interesting story.
On Friday the Star carried a picture of Zimbabwean
President Robert Mugabe
seated on the right side of former Malaysian Prime
Minister Mahatir Mohamed
in a group portrait of the participants in the
Perdana Global Peace Forum,
which Mahatir had organised. Mugabe's prominent
position in the line-up
suggested he was going to make a big speech. No
doubt he would use the
platform to launch one of his usual tirades against
his old foes, George
Bush and Tony Blair. The Star questioned Mahatir about
the presence of
Mugabe, "who is known for human rights violations." Mahatir
explained that
he had not called "only like-minded people. If they have
anything to say
about how good it is for us to be a dictator, it is not for
us to accept".
The next day the New Straits Times carried a photograph
showing Mugabe
sitting glumly all by himself in an armchair at the
conference centre. The
organisers of the forum explained that Mugabe's
scheduled Friday lunch time
address to the forum had been cancelled -
because it had become apparent
that the audience would be too small.
Malaysians, it seemed, did not want to
hear what Mugabe had to
say.
Mohamed was a friend to Mugabe in the past, because they shared
a dislike of
the West. Some time ago Mugabe adopted a Go East policy to try
to compensate
for his isolation by the West. He looked first to China, which
had supported
Zanu during the liberation struggle. He seems to have got some
help from the
Chinese but not nearly as much as he wanted. They are no doubt
too savvy to
waste much investment in a dying concern. One could also see
Mugabe's
flirtation with Libyan Brother Leader Muammar Gadaffi as part of
the Go East
initiative, in a broad sense. Gadaffi, another old enemy of the
West, agreed
to some investments in return for oil, including some farms.
The fact is
that all these old friends of Bob are moving on and do not
really have the
time or money to waste on someone who is increasingly being
exposed for what
he really is - a monstrously extended ego who is prepared
to destroy his
whole country to save himself.
Mahatir, for all
his faults, did great things for Malaysia. There was a
logic to his
criticism of Western institutions such as the IMF and the
global currency
speculators like George Soros, whom he felt were hurting his
country. China
has of course embraced the spirit of capitalism with furious
enthusiasm,
even if it calls it "socialism with Chinese characteristics".
The Chinese
may have applauded Mugabe's seizure of white farms back in 2000
but they can
see now that he never really intended to develop them for his
landless
peasants. Even Gadaffi has moved on. Since his flirtation with
Mugabe, he
has publicly abandoned his nuclear weapons programme and begun
courting
Western investment. Like the black intellectuals and journalists
who
applauded Mugabe back in 2000 as a great liberator of the land, one by
one
Mugabe's supporters have seen through him and dropped him. It may have
suited Mahatir to support Mugabe as an ally against the West. But ordinary
Malaysians, it was evident this week, have little time for him. The tedious
old anti-British colonialism drum that Mugabe beats may yet still resonate
in Africa but not much in the East. A Malaysian academic put it in
perspective last week when he said that; "Of course the British developed
Malaysia for their own good. But they also enriched us." The East accepts
that the past is past and looks to the future. And Mugabe, more than most,
is yesterday's man.
Daily Mirror, Zimbabwe
From
Netsai Kembo in Mutare
issue date :2005-Dec-19
GOLD panners fleeing
police raids at Tarka Forest in Chimanimani have
reportedly shifted base and
descended on Mozambican deposits amid an outcry
about causing massive
environmental degradation there.
Police sources in Chimanimani said they had
since intensified border patrols
in a bid to check and control the movement
of people.
"There is much concern about the panners' devastating activities
on the
Mozambican side. The illegal operatives are crossing the border in
large
numbers to extract the precious mineral from the Chimanimani Mountain
on the
Mozambican side and other areas like Madimba and Dima," said a senior
police
officer who requested anonymity.
"The situation has prompted us to
intensify border patrols, but we still
encounter problems in our endeavours
to completely curb the practice (gold
panning)."
The officer said
traditional leaders from the affected areas had also
expressed their
disappointment at the level of land degradation due to
unplanned gold
panning.
According to villagers in Vumba-Rusitu Valley, the panners jump the
border
into Mozambique at night to dig into the bowels of the earth where
the
precious mineral is reportedly abundant.
Said headman Jacob Derera of
Vumba: "A lot of people from far away places
are flocking to Mozambique for
gold panning in the Chimanimani mountains and
other areas. The scenario
started just a few months ago after police
intensified raids at Tarka
Forest."
Headman Derera said traditional leaders from the affected areas had
since
approached their Mozambican counterparts with a view to finding a
lasting
solution to the environmental menace.
News24
18/12/2005 21:44 -
(SA)
Harare - Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has
suspended five
senior members of his party, deepening serious splits in the
party, a
spokesperson said on Sunday.
Nelson Chamisa, the
spokesperson for Tsvangirai's faction of the Movement
for Democratic Change
(MDC) said a disciplinary committee decided on
Saturday to suspend five
senior party officials, including secretary general
Welshman Ncube and the
party's president, Gibson Sibanda.
"Each of them had the right to defend
themselves, which they gave up,"
Chamisa said.
He said Ncube and his
deputy, Gift Chamanikire were suspended for two years,
while party treasurer
Fletcher Dulini-Ncube and MDC lawmaker Trudy Stevenson
were each suspended
for a year.
Sibanda, who was suspended for a year will be able have his
case reviewed at
the national congress next February, said Chamisa. The
others have the right
to appeal against their suspension before the party's
national council.
The five are key members of a faction of the MDC that
supported
participation in last month's senate elections.
The party
has been seriously divided over the issue. Tsvangirai had called
for a
boycott of the poll.
Home Affairs has dispelled all rumours that there is a go-slow at Beitbridge border post |
An SABC cameraperson was assaulted while filming at
the South African side of the Beitbridge border post with Zimbabwe.
The
man was filming outside the border post offices when he was allegedly attacked
by a security guard who wanted to prevent him from filming at the border post.
Four SABC journalists were reporting on congestion at the border post. The guard
threatened to confiscate the camera.
The cameraperson allegedly injured
his neck in the scuffle.
Earlier it was said that the border post was
returning to normal after congestion at the weekend. Motorists wanting to enter
Zimbabwe had to wait in long queues while their documents were being processed.
Some travellers say they waited more than 24 hours.
Nkosana Sibuyi, a
home affairs spokesperson, says this time of the year always poses a challenge.
Sibuyi said customs officials were not on a go-slow.
From cricinfo, 19 December
Steven Price
Despite assurances from Peter
Chingoka, the Zimbabwe Cricket chairman, that
the relationship between board
and players is not as bad as the media has
been making out, cricinfo has
found out that it is. Last week, Chingoka told
the Harare-based Herald
newspaper: ""We do not see this as the battle for
the players. After
successfully negotiating for them, the players have their
contracts now.
Some have signed them while others are still to. Because they
got the
conditions they asked for, we expect them to sign too." But a
spokesman for
the players said that despite numerous attempts to meet with
ZC officials,
that had not proved possible as the offices have been closed
at short notice
for Christmas, adding that Chingoka's assertion the contract
issue was ended
was "utter rubbish". While he accepted that the deal was
almost closed a
month ago, ZC then "moved the goalposts". Three principal
issues remain
unresolved - the exchange-rate peg used to calculate basic
remuneration; the
unilateral decision by ZC to go back on an agreement to
pay
contractually-stipulated match fees in US dollars (as they always have
been)
and to instead now impose payment in local currency ; and the fact
that ZC
are failing to meet contractual obligations to provide fuel and, in
some
cases, also vehicles for players. Cricinfo has learned that one
national
player is having to jog 12km to and from training because ZC have
not given
him a vehicle or fuel allowance. At the same time, it is reported
that ZC
officials' cars are being kept on the road.
Furthermore, private
statements by some ZC staff to players are to the
effect that the players
are now being deliberately punished for standing up
to the ZC and are being
victimised as a group, for they are seen by the
administration as being the
party responsible for involving the monetary
authorities in investigating
ZC. While the players are training ahead of the
forthcoming tours to
Bangladesh and South Africa, that appears to be to
ensure they are ready
should the dispute with the board be resolved and also
because they are
being placed under pressure by the authorities not to miss
international
fixtures for fear it will place Zimbabwe's continued ICC
membership in
jeopardy . If it is not resolved, then they are likely to take
a vote
shortly before they are due to leave for Bangladesh in early January
and
will decide then if they are prepared to play. As things stand, few of
them
seem willing to go back on their statement that they would will not
play for
Zimbabwe while Chingoka and Ozias Bvute remain in charge.
The
contract dispute should have been resolved by the end of August and the
players only agreed to take part in matches against India on the written
understanding that ZC would sort things out in September. However, not only
has no solution been brokered, but many players have yet to be paid for
either series against India or New Zealand in August and September. The
patience and courage of the players is also being tested by threats
allegedly made against some of them that they face being reported to the
authorities for foreign exchange offences if they do not toe the line. Last
week, two players and the team manager were briefly held in custody and
subsequently fined for contravening the country's forex rules. If that were
not enough, there is a dispute as to who is the legitimate person to coach
the side ahead of January's tours, with both Phil Simmons and Kevin Curren
laying claim to the position.
From The Los Angeles Times, 19 December
Many displaced when the government razed squatter
camps are back, desperate
and fearful
By Robyn Dixon, Times Staff
Writer
Killarney - Six months after the government tore down her
house, Sifelani
Lunga lies sweating in a dirt-floor shack on the same
desolate stretch of
mud. Just coming back has made her a fugitive. Like
thousands of people
dumped in rural areas after the government razed
squatter shacks and street
stalls, she crept back to the remains of this
settlement outside Zimbabwe's
second-largest city, Bulawayo, because she
could not survive in the
countryside. As the Zimbabwe government and United
Nations argue about
providing shelter for the people who have been thrown
out of their homes,
thousands like Lunga have no secure refuge and live in
fear of police raids.
The UN's top humanitarian affairs official, Jan
Egeland, tried to persuade
President Robert Mugabe this month to accept
tents for those left homeless
after the government implemented "Operation
Murambatsvina," a Shona phrase
meaning "clean out the filth." The
demolitions, which began in May,
destroyed the homes of 700,000 people and
affected a total of 2.4 million,
according to a highly critical UN
report.
"The humanitarian situation in Zimbabwe is extremely serious,
and it is
deteriorating," Egeland told journalists after his visit this
month,
describing the evictions as "one of the worst things at the worst
possible
moment in Zimbabwe." But Mugabe told Egeland, "We are not a tents
people..
We believe in houses," said presidential spokesman George Charamba,
who was
quoted in the state-owned Herald newspaper. The government has
agreed,
however, to accept UN food aid for 3 million hungry people, about a
quarter
of the country's population. Zimbabwe announced a massive housing
construction plan in the aftermath of Operation Murambatsvina, but by
December only a few hundred houses had been built and the program had come
to a halt. Human Rights Watch said the program was unaffordable to the vast
majority of displaced people because it required proof of regular salary and
payment of a deposit.
After riot police and bulldozers destroyed
houses in Killarney, thousands of
displaced people found shelter in the
city's churches until police evicted
them again. They were sent to the
countryside in what critics call a
campaign to dismantle the opposition's
urban support. When Lunga, a
43-year-old widow with HIV, arrived in the
village where she'd been exiled,
she found no food and no clinic. She
struggled back to the ruins of
Killarney, along with hundreds of others, but
she has no money for transport
to Bulawayo clinics or churches where food is
handed out, and is too ill to
make the walk of nearly two hours. She lay
curled on a ragged blanket on the
dank ground in a smoky, leaking hut. She
had a fever and had been vomiting
for three days. Albert Chatindo, pastor of
the Christian Faith Fellowship
Church, is coordinating efforts to trace
those evicted and to feed the
hungry, but he said the churches did not have
enough food or vehicles to
feed everyone sent into the
countryside.
"I see the government has no love for the people. Since
they moved them and
dumped them, they never followed up," he said. Chatindo
said the demolitions
dismantled delicate social networks of support: Most
people had no family or
friends in the rural areas where they were sent.
Some were rejected by local
chiefs. "People are not accepting them. They are
accused of being the
opposition Movement for Democratic Change," he said,
referring to the only
significant opposition party, now bitterly split.
"People say to us, 'Why
are you giving food and shelter to these people?
They are not your
children.' " In Bulawayo, churches are not allowed
distribute food to the
returning squatters. "We can't take the food out
there because if we do,
we're confronting the government structures. They
must come and collect it,"
Chatindo said. "But we have defied the rules. I
often take porridge or
[corn] meal to the sick people. You have to save
lives."
Chatindo has adopted four teenage girls he found wandering in
the street
during the demolition operation. Last month, he buried a
6-month-old baby,
Flora Mkandla, who was born at the time of the evictions.
Her family is
squatting in an abandoned, half-built house with no roof on
Bulawayo's
outskirts. Flora's death certificate was marked "malnutrition."
She died
five days after her mother, Mavis Mkandla, who was HIV-positive and
unable
to get treatment. "Mavis used to tell us she wouldn't live," said
Mkandla's
sister-in-law, Silanesiwe Kiwani, 39. "She said, 'Take this baby
of mine.
What is going to happen after I die is that this baby will also
die.' I
accepted with a willing heart, but it is not an easy thing." There
is a
cautious, fearful atmosphere hanging over the scattered makeshift huts
that
several hundred people have hastily put up in Killarney and at the
Ingozi
mine outside Bulawayo. "When the police come, they'll definitely
destroy
these shacks," said one returnee, Jutias Muleya, 37. "We are not
really safe
here." Chatindo said the number of those returning grows daily:
"People are
flocking back here. They could not make it where they
were."
One who came back, Bernard Ncube, 52, has been unemployed for
10 years. He
used to scrape a living by panning for gold near Killarney to
feed his four
children. Since being evicted, there has been no way to make
money. He was
sent to Mbembesi village, about 50 miles from Bulawayo, and
stayed three
months. He had no relatives or friends there, and no work. "It
is far away.
There was no way to live there. I came back here to find money
to buy food,"
he said, but he relies on Bulawayo churches for food. "If I
could find a
job . " He trailed off. "But now I can't get a job. I can't do
anything."
Another squatter who has returned to Killarney, Jealous Moyo, 46,
had been
sent with his wife and five children to stay with his younger
sister in a
village 125 miles from away. But his sister has eight children
of her own,
and within a few days it was obvious her husband could not feed
everyone. "I
saw the food was too little," he said. "I didn't tell them the
truth, that
we could see they couldn't afford to feed us." Recalling his old
house,
bulldozed to dust, he was wistful. It was brick, with a good snug
roof and
three small rooms, the kind of home he fears his family will never
have
again.
Zim Daily
Monday, December 19 2005 @ 12:05 AM
GMT
Contributed by: correspondent
A
confidential Zanu PF document obtained by zimdaily reveal a
plot to shut
down four non governmental organisations which the ruling party
accuse of
"ratcheting pressure to unseat the government using clandestine
and
subservience means." The report unveils a plot by the ruling Zanu PF to
shutdown constitutional lobby group National Constitutional Assembly (NCA),
humanitarian agency Department for International Development (DFID) and two
Bulawayo based pressure groups Bulawayo Agenda and Women of Zimbabwe Arise
(WOZA).
The report, compiled by Zanu PF administration
secretary and CIO
boss Didymus Mutasa was presented to the ruling party's
central commitee
during the just ended Zanu PF conference. The report
unveils a plan hatched
by the ruling party to "bring to book" the NGOs which
the ruling party
accuse of pursuing an agenda to "unseat the legitimately
elected government
of Zimbabwe." The report further alleges that the four
NGOs were "surrogates
of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change
(MDC)."
"The opposition is also grouped in the form of non
governmental
organisation and civic groups all sponsored by the United
Kingdom, the
United States and the European Union. NGOs such as DFID, NCA,
WOZA and
Bulawayo Agenda are clear cases in point. Stern action shall be
taken
against them," the report says. The report came as the ruling Zanu PF
took
steps to retable the NGO Bill that could not become law after Mugabe
hesitated to put his signature to the Bill following an international outcry
over the despotism of the law.
Zimdaily heard that
during the presentation of the report to
the Central Committee, Social
Welfare minister Nicholas Goche lobbied to
have the NGO Bill returned to
Parliament "for further consideration and
refinement now that we have a
senate." The NGO Bill proposes a raft of
despotic measures against NGOs that
include criminalisation of NGO
activities including humanitarian work and
civic education. The ruling party
alleges that the NGOs are carrying out
"political activities using funds
from foreign sources." The report states
that "government agents" are
presently "monitoring" the NGOs to probe their
activities.
Goche is said to have appointed a task-force with
members
recruited from other government ministries and from the CIO to
inspect and
investigate the activities of the four NGOs. The government
hopes to unearth
information that might give it a pretext to close or
restrict the NGOs which
it says are "opposed to our rule The National
Association of
Non-Governmental Organisations (NANGO), the main
representative body for
civic society groups in the country, said the report
reinforces reports from
several local and international NGOs who say they
are receiving "regular
visits at their offices by the government
taskforce."
NANGO information officer Fambai Ngirande charged
that the probe
appeared to go beyond merely establishing whether civic
bodies were
operating within the law but had a "political dimension" to it.
Ngirande
said: "The inter ministerial team, which appointed inspecting
officers, is
currently doing the rounds investigating NGOS around various
aspects of
their operations. We understand that the team also includes
representatives
from different line ministries.
"Whereas
the minister is legally entitled to carry out
investigations under the
auspices of PVO (Private Voluntary Organisation)
Act on incidents of
maladministration, the process appears to go beyond
merely adhering to the
dictates of the law as there are other political
dimensions evident
particularly in the identification of the probed
organisations." The report
states that the government taskforce will among
other things inspect the
affairs and activities of each NGO, examine all
documentation relating to
the group's registration and also establish who
constitute its board of
trustees or directors.
The investigators will also probe
funding of NGOs to ensure that
groups receiving funding from outside the
country comply with foreign
currency regulations. NGOs have become the
target of government attacks
after exposing in the last five years
corruption, gross human rights abuses
and general misrule by President
Robert Mugabe and his government. Mugabe in
turn accuses NGOs of working
with his Western enemies to incite Zimbabweans
against his rule.
The Herald (Harare)
December
17, 2005
Posted to the web December 19, 2005
Zvamaida Murwira Recently
in Nyanga
Harare
NON-QUALIFIED teachers must be phased out within four
years and replaced by
retired and student teachers.
The resolution
was adopted on Thursday by senior Government officials at a
conference on
teacher education in Nyanga.
It was agreed that by 2009 no unqualified
teacher should be allowed to go
into the classroom to conduct
lessons.
The officials included Secre-tary for Higher and Tertiary
Education Dr
Washington Mbi-zvo and his Education, Sport and Culture
counterpart Dr
Stephen Mahere.
Also present were provincial education
officers, directors in both
ministries, lecturers from the University of
Zimbabwe, principals of teacher
training colleges, and teachers'
representatives.
Dr Mbizvo, who moved the motion, pointed out that other
countries did not
use untrained teachers in their system and questioned the
logic of Zimbabwe
placing reliance on them.
"We did a research in
2000 whilst I was Secretary for Education, Sport and
Culture and discovered
that some headmasters and other people were
capitalising on that as there
were getting a beast every year from them
(unqualified teachers) as
kickbacks," said Dr Mbizvo.
"In other countries, a person cannot just
walk from the street into a
classroom and tamper with children as what is
currently happening here.
"Why don't we just do away with them? That is
one way of making the job
regarded as a profession. If a temporary teacher
has failed to get a place
at colleges, it means something is terribly wrong
with him and some of them
have 12 certificates obtained from many sittings,"
he said.
Kwekwe Technical College principal Mr Joyce Mbudzi concurred
with Dr Mbizvo,
saying in other spheres like nursing, engineering and
lecturing, no
temporary personnel were but trained
professionals.
"Teaching has not been realised as a profession by our
employer because we
engage general hands (as unqualified teachers) so the
argument would be: Why
pay you higher salaries when your job can be done by
unskilled workers?" he
said.
The conference resolved that student
teachers should fill vacant posts and
take full charge of a class unlike the
present system where they are
attached to a qualified teacher as one way of
filling the gap.
It was felt that student teachers should be deployed in
remote areas to
expose them to the environment they would be working in
after completion of
training.
This was expected to go a long way in
reducing the long-standing problem of
newly qualified teachers shunning to
work outside urban areas, resulting in
severe understaffing of rural
schools.
Public Service Commissioner Mr Steven Ngwenya, who was guest of
honour, said
the commission's regulations were alterable and they were open
to discussion
about proposed changes.
"The PSC (Public Service
Commission) regulations are looked into regularly
and are changeable. We did
that with other departments like the immigration,
pensions offices and those
with no qualifications, we gave them three years
to get the requisite
qualifications," said Mr Ngwenya.
The PSC was exploring ways of giving
non-monetary incentives to teachers and
other civil servants to avoid the
inflationary effects of frequent salary
rises.
The conference adopted
the setting up of a Teaching Service Council by
December next year and this
was expected to be a watchdog on education
standards.
The adoption
came after protracted debate as some called for the
introduction of a
Teaching Service Commission, which would have the effect
of removing
teachers from the PSC.
Masvingo Teachers' College principal Mr Rangarirai
Masarira, who moved the
motion, said the setting up of a commission, in the
manner of the Police
Service Commission, would go a long way in improving
conditions of service
for teachers.
Mr Masarira, a long-serving
president of the Zimbabwe Teachers' Association
(Zimta), criticised the
conditions of service for teachers and even college
principals, saying
principals were no longer affording to continue staying
in low-density
suburbs, let alone meeting the running costs of their
vehicles.
Dr
Mbizvo, however, opposed the setting-up of a commission but a council,
saying the latter would be more effective than the former.
He said
countries with teaching service commissions had needs peculiar to
them and
these might not be applicable to Zimbabwe.
"We might have 20 service
commissions, but that would not improve conditions
of service. Let us create
a council to set the standards for employment and
quality for teacher
training. By so doing, we would then professionalise the
job," he
said.
"Right now, I have a letter from the Medical and Dental
Practitioners'
Council complaining about the quality of dental training at
NUST (National
University of Science and Technology), so that is what we
want -- a
teacher's council that oversees quality and standards."
The
conference also agreed on the need to reintroduce education officers who
were removed from the system during a rationalisation process by the
Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture a few years ago.
Zimbabwe
Open University chairperson of the Teacher Education Department, Dr
Sharayi
Chakanyuka, said the distance learning institution would start
offering a
Diploma in Education on a part-time basis for temporary teachers
in
Matabeleland North and Mashonaland Central provinces next year.
She said
this would be done on condition that they would continue working in
those
provinces when they qualify since it had been noted that the provinces
had
the highest number of untrained teachers.
The objective of the conference
was to involve stakeholders in exploring,
recommending, and mapping the
vision and way forward for quality in
education.
The Herald
(Harare)
December 19, 2005
Posted to the web December 19,
2005
Harare
THE Bulawayo City Council and the Zimbabwe National
Water Authority are
embroiled in a bitter exchange of words after the latter
allegedly released
water from two Umguza dams resulting in the loss of fish
worth millions of
dollars.
According to a monthly report of the local
authority's Environmental
Management and Engineering Services Committee for
November, the Zimbabwe
National Water Authority employees allegedly drained
the water to cater for
farmers downstream.
"A report was received
from Mguza Nature Reserve indicating that all the
water had been drained
from both Upper Umguza and Lower Umguza.
"When rangers arrived locals had
collected all the fish and all forms of
aquatic life had been totally
destroyed.
"People were seen carrying 50 kg bags. Apart from the
destruction of aquatic
life, no consideration was given to leave some water
for game," the
committee said.
The committee said that some of the
fish had been imported, including the
bass and carp species.
"Revenue
from fishing on council servitude is no more although the council
had
stocked the dams with fish that included the bass and carp which were
exotic
species," the committee noted.
Before the rains started falling early
this month, the council had resorted
to resuscitating a borehole in the area
to provide water for wild animals.
Bowsers were also used to ferry water
to the Mguza Nature Reserve. The
council's Director of Housing and Community
Services, Mr Isaiah Magagula,
told the committees that council rangers
reported that 15 people found on
the scene collecting fish were all Zinwa
officials.
He said that Zinwa was informed of council's intention to use
the dams. The
water authority owns the two dams.
The committee
resolved that "the office of the Executive Mayor, (Mr Japhet
Ndabeni-Ncube)
should contact and express council's concern over the action
taken by the
water authority to drain all the water from the Mguza dams
destroying
aquatic life which council had invested in."
Efforts to get a comment
from the Zinwa catchment manager, Mr Matson
Chidakwa were
fruitless.
Zinwa recently announced plans to build three dams namely
Mid-Umguza, Lukwe
and Cowdray Park to solve water shortages in the farming
area of Umguza.
Monthly Review
by Patrick Bond and Richard Saunders
When
Zimbabwe attained its first independent government in 1980, led by
President
Robert Mugabe and liberation fighters of the Zimbabwe African
National
Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), there were reasons to hope for a
bright
future. The new country inherited significant infrastructure from the
prior
Rhodesian settler regime, including relatively modern transportation
and
communications systems and an impressive set of import substitution
industries. The economy had been built with extensive state support and
planning (along with capital controls) to evade UN sanctions. By way of
reconciliation, Mugabe sought good relations with local and regional
capital, while establishing economic ties to China and East Bloc countries
that had supported the liberation struggle. Roughly 100,000 white settlers
remained in the country, operating the commanding heights of commerce,
finance, industry, mining, and large-scale agriculture, as well as domestic
small businesses. The 1980s witnessed rapid growth at first, then droughts,
with 5 percent GDP growth when rainy seasons were average or better. Thanks
to the construction of thousands of new clinics and schools, indices of
health and education showed marked improvement.
But 1991 was a
turning point for Zimbabwe, as it was for Iraq, the
Soviet Union, Argentina,
India, Cuba, and elsewhere. The United States was
suddenly the sole
superpower, and the IMF, World Bank, and General Agreement
on Tariffs and
Trade (later the World Trade Organization) wasted no time
imposing a global
neoliberal iron heel. Zimbabwe had significant
international debts, and
suddenly new debt service was "conditioned" on
yielding to the global
neoliberal dictatorship. The large state sector and
protected local
industries inherited from the prior regime were condemned as
"inefficient"
and an Economic Structural Adjustment Program (ESAP) was
adopted by Mugabe
with considerable enthusiasm. The results were disastrous.
Manufacturing
output declined by 40 percent from 1991 to 1995, accompanied
by a similar
decline in workers' real standard of living and a dramatic
increase in
inflation that ravaged savings and those in the informal
economy. Hunger
struck the countryside. Public education and health
expenditures shrank at
the very moment that the AIDS pandemic struck the
country. The adult HIV
infection rate is over 20 percent, and according to
government figures,
about 5,000 people die of AIDS-related illnesses each
week. More than one
thousand schoolteachers have died of AIDS since
mid-2004, and the teachers
union reports that 25 percent of its members are
living with AIDS. The great
majority can no longer afford the
government-subsidized antiretroviral
therapy, which in any event is
available only in the two major urban
centers. Foreign exchange is scarce,
and with domestic industry destroyed in
the 1990s by ESAP, many consumer
goods are often unobtainable, from gasoline
to sanitary napkins. At one time
self-sufficient in food grains, Zimbabwe
must now import massive amounts of
cereals from donors to avoid outright
starvation in the countryside. Through
this nightmare the exhausted
nationalist Mugabe ZANU-PF regime has clung to
power, too sick to arrest the
accelerating decline but yet too strong to
die.
Beginning with
the introduction of ESAP, Zimbabwe's workers in the
shrinking organized
economy and especially the head office of the Zimbabwe
Congress of Trade
Unions (ZCTU) have been the center of gravity for the
country's political
opposition, broadly defined. In elections the Mugabe
regime resorts to
blatant vote-rigging, patronage politics, and brutal
repression. As the
economy disintegrated, the regime responded to the
consequences (including
rural flight to the cities) with force. The mid-2005
Operation
Murambatsvina-"clean up the trash"-was one of the more extreme
instances,
leaving an estimated 300,000 urban families uprooted during the
cold winter
without warning, their informal township houses and market
stalls razed
while they were dumped in the countryside.
Although ZCTU membership
has oscillated between just 150,000 and
200,000 (roughly 15 percent of the
employed workforce), in a country of
approximately 12 million, the labor
movement is today the most powerful
single non-state force in the society.
As in Zambia to the north during the
late 1980s (leading to a change in
government in 1991), and in South Africa
from the mid-1980s to the
mid-1990s, organized workers could still play the
decisive role in this
society's slow, painful democratization. Moreover, in
advancing a
desperately needed anti-neoliberal alternative, a left alliance
between
labor and Zimbabwe's emerging social movements remains the sole
continuing
hope for a truly democratic way out of the disaster.
Over the
post-1991 period the ZCTU has oscillated between, on the one
hand,
opposition to neoliberalism and, on the other, anti-Mugabe electoral
pacts
with petit-bourgeois sectors that openly called for increased
neoliberal
measures. A crucial period lies ahead, during which corporatist
bait may
once again be dangled in front of the ZCTU. The prospect of
personality-pacting within the petit-bourgeois political elite, combining
"moderates" from the ruling party and the badly-split opposition Movement
for Democratic Change, will arise when eighty-one-year-old Robert Mugabe is
finally-before a scheduled 2008 presidential election-eased out from his now
quarter-century-long rule, in part by South African president Thabo Mbeki.
(The opposition is divided over whether to participate in the November
election of a new Senate, with the labor-oriented bloc advocating a boycott
due to the Senate's illegitimacy and Mugabe's vote-rigging tactics.) Mbeki
must also be worried about the potentially parallel role of the Congress of
South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which last year embarked on a ZCTU
solidarity offensive, putting it in direct conflict with Mbeki's African
National Congress (ANC). The danger in Zimbabwe is that both the established
and the new political elites seek a transition to a post-Mugabe government
that will entail marginalizing the popular sector.
Democratic
Challenges, State Responses
Since Zimbabwe's formal independence in
1980, the majority of the
country's workers and urban poor have come to
understand and criticize the
exhaustion of the national liberation
movement's moral standing, the state's
zigzagging economic policies, the
ruling party's malgovernance, and Mugabe's
dictatorial tendencies. Workers
were not as important as the guerrilla army
in bringing an end to Rhodesian
colonial rule in 1980, but they voted
overwhelmingly for ZANU-PF-even over
the Zimbabwe African People's Union,
led by the late Joshua Nkomo, the
country's first national trade union
leader-given the former's stronger
military presence across the country and
its broader-based linguistic and
cultural links. The honeymoon ended nearly
immediately, as Mugabe conspired
with Anglo American Corporation leader
Harry Oppenheimer to smash strikes at
the company's Hwange colliery and
sugar plantations a few weeks after
independence. Shortly afterwards, Mugabe
declared a strike of bakery workers
to be "nothing short of criminal," as he
reined in potentially explosive
urban demands for change.
Long a site of factional conflict and
competition in the late colonial
period, the labor movement became a key
target for ZANU-PF's political
restructuring shortly after 1980, following a
series of widespread and
sometimes violently suppressed industrial actions.
In 1981, the ruling party
engineered institutional control over labor by
welding existing labor
centers into the ZCTU and manipulating the key
leadership positions. Debased
by direct political intervention,
unaccountable union leadership and an
increasingly hostile labor regime put
in place by government, the new
national labor center crashed by the
mid-1980s under the weight of
corruption, conflict among political factions,
and growing unpopularity
among workers. They saw few results produced by the
politically ensnared
organization. A significant factor was the rise of a
new generation of union
activists, slowly moving into affiliate positions of
authority, who were in
place to demand greater accountability to workers. By
1987 a new ZCTU
leadership emerged from the ranks of the labor center's
affiliates,
including ZCTU Secretary General Morgan Tsvangirai from the
mines and
President Gibson Sibanda from the railways.
Slowly,
the ZCTU began to nurture a degree of autonomy from the ruling
party,
reflected in the formation of public alliances with other
groups-especially
students-petitioning the state over the fading of
progressive values and
over the first revelations of corruption in the
ruling party and civil
service. While ZANU-PF maintained the rhetorical
pretense of a socialist
development program, this presented few serious
points of conflict. But with
the ruling party's shift to the right at the
end of the 1980s, confirmed by
its wholesale adoption of ESAP, the labor
movement's growing autonomy,
grassroots popularity, and vociferous
skepticism about adjustment
represented an important obstacle for ZANU-PF.
Already in 1989,
Tsvangirai was jailed briefly after he endorsed
strident student protests
against government corruption and multinational
corporate influence. As
structural adjustment bit harder, Mugabe introduced
labor laws that severely
restricted collective bargaining and other union
activities. The government
used security forces to disrupt peaceful
demonstrations against structural
adjustment and the labor regulations. A
decade of unprecedented industrial
and social action was launched, featuring
a wave of public and private
sector industrial actions in the mid 1990s that
soon grew to include
nationwide "political actions" against government
intransigence,
unaccountability, and mismanagement.
In the first national strikes
since 1948, commerce and industry were
brought to halt in "stay-aways" on
three occasions during 1997-98. In
December 1997, more than one million
workers, management, informal sector
entrepreneurs, and civil servants left
work and joined street demonstrations
to protest new levies and taxies
imposed by the government to cover the
unbudgeted costs of a secret,
enormous payout deal struck between President
Mugabe and "war veterans"-a
move provoked by public revelations of
high-level political corruption in
draining a war veterans injuries
compensation fund dry. Follow-up strikes in
1998 were equally successful in
attracting broad-based support across social
and economic interest groups.
Again, the ruling party and its allies
responded with violence backed by
increasingly exclusionary, nationalist
posturing. In December 1997
Tsvangirai was severely assaulted in his office
by suspected ZANU-PF
militants, and in March 1998 the ZCTU's Bulawayo
offices were firebombed.
"IMF Riots" occurred in Harare
periodically during the 1990s, as in so
many other Third World settings.
Finally, Zimbabwe's creative worker, NGO,
social movement, women's, youth,
student, church, and media activists
unified in search of programmatic
action, through the February 1999
"National Working People's Agenda for
Change" convention. This seminal
meeting issued a progressive platform,
which inspired its leading
participants to form a new party, soon known as
the Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC). But within months of its September
1999 launch, the MDC
revealed ambiguities. On the one hand, Tsvangirai
worked hard to build local
structures. On the other, the MDC attracted
funding and support from the
black petit-bourgeoisie and white elites, and
found dubious international
allies.
In many ways, contemporary
Zimbabwe politics date from the pivotal
moment in February 2000 when an
alliance of diverse civil-society
organizations including the ZCTU and its
National Constitutional Assembly
allies defeated the government in a
constitutional referendum. It was the
first referendum in the country's
history, and the first-ever defeat of
ZANU-PF in a national poll. The result
sent shock waves through the ruling
establishment and with parliamentary
elections looming in June 2000
precipitated a series of deeply destabilizing
events-including the invasion
by veterans of the liberation war of
settler-owned commercial farms, and
eventually mines and other productive
enterprises. Since then, state
institutions have been dramatically
restructured, and the militarization of
society has altered the nature of
both the ruling-class alliance within the
political hierarchy and the
terrain of civil-society activism. By these and
other means, new challenges
have emerged for the consolidation of the labor
movement's
political-economic agenda since 2000.
The state's onslaught on the
MDC's structures, leadership, and rank
and file did not eliminate the
opposition, but nonetheless severely
constrained the party's capacities on
the ground. Some commentators focus
narrowly on leadership politics within
the MDC and highlight significant
dangers for popular constituencies in the
MDC's apparent confusion over
whether to advocate social democracy or
neoliberalism, as well as internal
divisions between competing blocs.
Optimists rebut by reminding us of the
amorphous nature of the party
membership, institutional structures, and
leadership, and the continuing
open-ended debates on these issues throughout
the party. Most important may
be the comparatively large influence of union
structures and members within
lower and middle ranks of the party, although
many leading MDC politicians
are professionals, especially lawyers.
Mainstream observers also
tend to focus inordinate attention upon the
unfolding ZANU-PF leadership
scuffle, often reducing political processes to
ethnic loyalties. For some,
the problem of "governance" can allegedly be
solved by a transition to a
more moderate ruling-party leadership and
perhaps augmented by the
integration of opposition forces into government.
This is the solution long
sought by the South African government, which in
turn gives MDC leaders
periodic (false) hope that Mbeki will put substantial
pressure on Mugabe to
cut a deal. But in the process, fundamental aspects of
restructuring in
state and civil society that have occurred since 2000
mostly fell off the
radar screen. The political and institutional
restructuring of the state,
the continuing realignments in the domestic
economy, and the impact of both
on the array of social forces in civil
society pose extreme challenges to
the labor movement and to any politically
progressive project for the medium
term.
The old semi-developmental/welfarist state of the 1980s,
undermined by
1990s structural adjustment, has since been transfigured by
irregular
militarization. This has involved the removal or marginalization
of
professional state functionaries in key command posts and the placement
of
personnel from the state security agencies and informal paramilitaries
into
positions of effective public authority. Evidence is found in the
rebirth of
the land-invading war veterans as a paramilitary grouping
patronized by the
ruling party; the restructuring of local commands within
the Zimbabwe
Republic Police to bring into positions of authority personnel
linked to
ZANU-PF; the increasing role of the Zimbabwe National Army in
"policing" and
suppressing opposition voices inside Zimbabwe; and the
creation of a second
paramilitary organization in the form of the national
youth brigades.
Through these instruments the opposition been attacked and
in many areas
physically decimated. In addition, they reflect the
subordination of state
institutions to the short-term political needs of the
ZANU-PF leadership.
The new wave of militarization facilitated the
entrenchment of more
direct partisan control over public administration, and
it
deprofessionalized Zimbabwe's once-impressive state bureaucracy. Physical
assaults, threats, and intimidation against senior and junior civil
servants, public sector professionals (including teachers, doctors, and
nurses), magistrates and High Court judges, defense attorneys, and public
prosecutors, among others, have been widely reported. In many instances-for
example, the expulsion from their posts of senior government administrators
by war veterans, and attacks on legal professionals by ruling-party
supporters in the presence of the police-it appears that one aim of this
violence has been to profile the irregular powers enjoyed by the ruling
party and exercised with impunity, as a warning signal to potential
opponents. In addition, Mugabe has introduced a series of extremely
regressive laws regulating media and information institutions, rights to
public assembly, modes of political party financing and organization, and,
more recently, non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Highly partisan forms
of selective and strategic "justice" have been deployed in attacking the
opposition, its perceived supporters in civil society, and the wider terrain
of local communities.
Aside from ubiquitous militarization,
state capacity has been weak and
uneven. State-directed experiments have
been tried without adequate
administrative competence. Key institutional
elements in ZANU-PF's early and
modest developmental project-the local
health-care system, educational
institutions, local consulting structures,
etc.-were financially and
administratively undermined during the era of
structural adjustment.
Subsequently, the widespread "cleansing" of large
sections of the education
sector of perceived government opponents-since
many teachers support the
MDC-reduced school access and
quality.
In the face of the deepening crisis, favored ZANU-PF
elements have
gained new power in the domestic economy. High level state
corruption dates
to the 1980s, but since 2000 has worsened because the
"fast-track" land
redistribution program entails reallocation of large-scale
agricultural
capital assets in a climate of low transparency and high
partisanship under
ZANU-PF's direction. Major political and economic
benefits have accrued to
ZANU-PF clients. These benefits range from the
former white-owned commercial
farms (nearly 90 percent of white and
corporate-owned farms turned over
since 2000) to sections of the once
substantial collection of state
corporations and public infrastructure,
including the national power grid,
public telephone and telecommunications
network, national radio and
television monopoly, national railway, and
commercial plantations and
forestry holdings. Several dozen of the major
state corporations were slated
for privatization during the early 1990s by
structural adjustment planners,
but only a few were sold off at the time, in
a more or less public fashion.
Currently, in contrast, key assets-energy,
telecoms, and transport among
them-are being quietly acquired by interests
associated with the ruling
party, through direct means and through other
avenues such as special-access
licensing, leasing, and insider
trading.
The opaque character of the reshaped ZANU-PF state leaves
details
about the full extent of asset stripping mostly unaccounted for.
ZANU-PF's
private fire sale has compounded continuing disinvestment by the
state in
institutions servicing the social sector-and moreover, the
increasing
diversion of public resources away from social spending towards
the security
sector. In the process, elements of a parasitical "briefcase
businessmen"
elite have emerged through renewed deepening primitive
accumulation which
will pose a major barrier to labor's agenda in coming
years.
New Popular Responses
Many in the political and
civic opposition have failed to take full
cognizance of the implications of
the state's structural transformation, and
some would say, for good reason:
the key challenges posed by the state
transformation involve the
opposition's very survival. However, the labor
movement has, arguably,
better positioned itself to resist the implications
of the ongoing state
restructuring, thanks to its resistance to
privatization and support of
popular demands for the restitution of social
and economic rights. This
occurs both through daily practice within the
labor movement and in the
ZCTU's role in broader
social-civil-society-coalitions. Hence the labor
movement is mapping out
policy terrain and strategies that are independent
of, and on occasion at
odds with, those of the MDC-notably on issues of
economic policy, where
factions of the MDC continue still to advocate
neoliberal policies.
At the same time, the ZCTU has shown a
willingness to defend its
positions through periodic mass action, despite
continuing state attacks.
Notwithstanding a failure of nerve immediately
after the 2002 presidential
election theft, the ZCTU subsequently led or
participated in a series of
strikes and demonstrations, especially in
2003-04. Alone and in conjunction
with civic allies and the left flank of
the MDC, the ZCTU continues to
represent a problem for ZANU-PF's
reconfigured elitist nationalist project,
challenging the regime's claims of
having delivered "national justice"
through the economically disastrous and
politically chaotic land
redistribution program. Labor also influences MDC
and wider civil-society
debates by insisting on redistribution, arguing for
state rebuilding, and
pressing demands for social and economic rights of a
more tangible, popular
kind than those propagated by the ruling
party.
In reply, the state has been uncompromising, meting out
repeated
detentions, beatings, and threats against (and in some instance,
the torture
of) senior ZCTU officials, trade union leaders, and activists.
At the same
time, the state is undermining the ZCTU from within labor,
through attempts
(mostly unsuccessful) to establish a ZANU-PF-linked
counter-labor center,
the so-called Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions
(ZFTU). For a time headed
by prominent Harare war veteran Joseph Chinotimba,
the ZFTU developed few
structures on the ground and instead relied upon
violence, threats, and
state support to sustain its presence financially and
organizationally.
Preying on more vulnerable sectors of workers-in rural
plantation
agriculture and mining, for example-the ZFTU leveraged irregular
access to
workers (and revenue) by means of press-gang tactics. Their cadres
include
war veterans and other ZANU-PF-linked paramilitaries. It seems clear
that
without support from the state and paramilitaries, the ZFTU would
disappear.
The medium and long-term consequences of restructuring,
de-democratization, and in some instances gutting of the state during the
current period are profound. While mainstream commentators have focused on
the need for a leadership transition in ZANU-PF, the more substantial issue
of state/society form is left largely unaddressed. Although ZCTU leaders
have sometimes sought relief in corporatist institutions, these have
systematically failed to deliver.
Indeed, the more likely
outcome of the current political trajectory is
a deal which leaves out
labor. Other forces in civil society, lacking
accountability to (and
representation of) an identifiable popular
constituency, will more readily
entertain an elite transition acceptable to
the dominant faction of the
ruling-party leadership, recently-empowered
security apparatuses, black
business circles, and regional power brokers
like Mbeki. Therein lies a
critical role for regional and international
trade union organizations:
shoring up both the institutional integrity and
political-economic agenda of
the ZCTU. Can the Johannesburg-based COSATU
begin a meaningful program of
solidarity, given the federation's formal
Alliance partnership with Mbeki's
ANC?
Factoring in South Africa
Beyond conjunctural
moments such as the March 2005 election, the
highest-profile way in which
South Africa's influence is brought to bear on
Zimbabwe may be via a
bilateral lending relationship-to force economic
liberalization and
political "normalization" (as Pretoria put it)-and
diplomatically through
the African Union. That body's neoliberal
political-economic strategy, the
New Partnership for Africa's Development
(NEPAD), was endorsed by the Bush
administration as "philosophically
spot-on." It was launched by Mbeki and
his closest ally, Nigerian president
Olusegon Obasanjo, in October 2001.
Mugabe initially opposed NEPAD as an
extension of the imperialist project
into Africa. But within a year, Mugabe
and his foreign minister Stan Mudenge
were visited by Pretoria's foreign
minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, and a
few days later, finance minister
Herbert Murerwa proclaimed in his budget
speech that it was "critical that
Zimbabwe remains part of this [NEPAD]
process."
As a reward, in February 2003, Dlamini-Zuma stated, "We
will never
criticize Zimbabwe." The NEPAD secretariat's Dave Malcomson,
responsible for
international liaison and coordination, then admitted to a
reporter,
"Wherever we go, Zimbabwe is thrown at us as the reason why
NEPAD's a joke."
To illustrate, Mbeki failed in his March 2003
attempt to have Zimbabwe
readmitted to the Commonwealth group of former
British colonies, following
the March 2002 election-related suspension. He
then tried to ensure Mugabe
would be invited to the December 2003 meeting of
the Commonwealth in Abuja,
but lost more ground even among his standard
African allies. Indeed,
Zimbabwe was suspended indefinitely, leaving Mugabe
immediately to announce
at a ZANU-PF congress that Zimbabwe would quit the
organization. Mbeki,
clearly bitter upon his return home, helped craft a
statement issued by the
Southern African Development Community plus Uganda,
complaining that unnamed
Commonwealth members were "dismissive, intolerant
and rigid." Throughout
2004, similar displays of Mbeki-Mugabe solidarity
occurred, culminating in
the November veto by South Africa's United Nations
representative of a Human
Rights Commission condemnation of Zimbabwe's
repressive regime.
The most striking case of Pretoria's support for
Harare was the offer
of a $500 million loan last August, apparently at the
urging of the World
Bank. A large amount was meant to repay the
International Monetary Fund, to
which Zimbabwe's arrears reached $200
million by mid-2005. Mugabe initially
rejected Mbeki's offer and instead
scrounged $135 million in hard currency
from internal sources-by depriving
most Zimbabweans of gasoline and food
imports-so as to make a down payment
on the arrears.
Aside from the futile top-down financial power
politics, the most
significant recent bottom-up development in South
African-Zimbabwe relations
was labor solidarity. When several COSATU leaders
arrived in Harare in
October 2004 to meet the ZCTU and other activists, they
were quickly
arrested, driven 600 kilometers to the South African border,
and dumped
there in the middle of the night. The ANC responded by
criticizing the South
African union leaders. The ANC's leading official,
Kgalema Motlanthe
(himself formerly a mineworker leader), said: "They go
there with the
intention of defying a country's laws and they make it known.
This has value
for the newspapers but it has very little to do with
familiarizing yourself
with the situation." One of Mbeki's chief aides, Joel
Netshitenzhe,
dismissed with ridicule the eviction of the COSATU
fact-finding mission: "If
we allowed ourselves to be diverted by sideshows
we might lose sight of the
ball."
Refusing to be intimidated,
COSATU sent a high-profile delegation in
February 2005 which was evicted
immediately. "The Zimbabwean government's
action confirms reports that it is
contemptuous of human rights and civil
liberties," COSATU stated in a
follow-up session with the ZCTU in a border
town: "We will not abandon our
colleagues in Zimbabwe in their hour of
need." The result, notwithstanding
hysterical opposition from the ANC Youth
League-on this issue, loyal to
Mbeki, and in turn to Mugabe-was COSATU's
threat to barricade the
Zimbabwe-South Africa border during the run-up to
the election. The threat
was downgraded to a picket during the run-up to the
March 2005
election.
There was similar ambiguity within South Africa's
independent left. At
the opening of a mass demonstration of nearly 20,000
against the
Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, a
leader of
the Landless People's Movement (LPM) called out from the stage,
"Viva Robert
Mugabe, Viva! Viva ZANU-PF, Viva!" to applause from a large
rural
delegation. In response, Trevor Ngwane (nephew of the assassinated
Zimbabwean liberation leader Herbert Chitepo), who is a key figure in the
country's main radical urban social movement, the Anti-Privatization Forum
(APF), took the microphone: "While we are happy to have unity with the
landless, we respectfully disagree on the matter of Mugabe. He is a dictator
and he has killed many Zimbabweans." In early 2005, the LPM, APF, and
Jubilee South Africa engaged in a joint fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe on
the shared premise that Mugabe was a repressive dictator. Even though they
did not have a consensus statement on the election, South Africa's leftist
movements agree that both urban and rural social movement solidarity must be
established for the long haul.
Time will tell whether
short-term border pickets and other contentious
acts of labor solidarity, in
the context of ongoing structural adjustment in
South Africa, might drive a
wedge between the ANC and COSATU, not dissimilar
to that of ZANU-PF and the
ZCTU during the late 1990s. Mugabe's tainted
victory at the March 31
parliamentary poll only fueled a growing South
African-Zimbabwe solidarity
movement, one which has gathered widespread
support through a South African
left that is otherwise divided on most
strategic issues.
Whose
Internationalism?
ZANU-PF is itself in crisis over Mugabe's
successor, as reflected in a
spectacular February 2005 purge of former
information minister Jonathan Moyo
and a dozen high-ranking politicians in
his orbit. The main tension
concerned whether parliamentary speaker Emmerson
Mnangagwa or long-time
minister Joyce Mujuru-wife of Mugabe's most trusted
military chief-would
gain a vice-presidency; the latter won in spite of a
conspiratorial effort
led by Moyo. But ZANU-PF's internal chaos does not
derail Mugabe's desperate
search for legitimacy, according to socialist
commentator Briggs Bomba: "The
party is doing everything to regain the
confidence of international capital,
and to reintegrate with the
'international community.' Reserve Bank Governor
Gideon Gono is leading
efforts to liberalize not just the monetary system
but the whole economy and
to re-engage international institutions like the
IMF and the World Bank.
Politically the party is softening its attack on
western powers, as by the
recent IMF debt repayments."
In this confusing context, certainly
the biggest challenge for
Zimbabwean labor is to survive so it can fight
another day and in the
process to strengthen links to left-leaning allies in
community
organizations and social movements. The society's dangerous drift
may only
be reversed once labor and its progressive civic allies set the
opposition's
agenda firmly to the left.
In the midst of the
brief threat that Zimbabwe might be expelled from
the IMF, a leading MDC
figure saw fit publicly to ask the IMF to impose on
Zimbabwe "a wide range
of reforms designed to strengthen the private sector
and the market
mechanism." The MDC division is, at surface level, over
whether or not to
participate in electoral politics. But the split also
reflects the
incoherent coalition of ZCTU and civil-society leftists with
political
elites and neoliberals who are unabashed in seeking support from
the Bretton
Woods Institutions and the Blair and Bush regimes. The goal of
the imperial
powers is the creation of a "corporatist" coalition between the
MDC and
"reasonable" ZANU-PF figures based on an "elite-transition" program
that
reintegrates Zimbabwe into the U.S.-UK world order. Mbeki prefers to
let
ZANU-PF retain power, with a post-Mugabe regime guided by the business
bloc
around the neoliberal central banker Gono and potentially led by former
finance minister Simba Makoni.
In late October 2005, the ZCTU
held a workshop of its leadership. The
ZCTU leadership resolved that
"[m]arket-based economic strategies, which
have caused untold problems for
the working people of Zimbabwe and
elsewhere, especially women and children,
should be discontinued...," that
"[t]he current pro-globalisation regional
integration should be replaced by
a solidarity-based regional integration
which promotes industrial
development and protects national economies from
the adverse impacts of
globalisation", and that "[e]fforts to liberalise
economies through
negotiations on Economic Partnership Agreements, World
Trade Organisation
and especially the Doha Development Round of negotiations
and the
forthcoming 6th WTO Ministerial scheduled for Hong Kong in December
2005
should be resisted."
This stand is the basis for renewed
social leadership by the ZCTU. The
union structures will have to transcend
their current ability to call
periodic but generally containable mass
stay-aways, and target more surgical
parts of the regime's capacity without
risking decapitation by ZANU-PF and
its paramilitaries. And while increasing
its technical inputs into
programmatic work by civil society, the ZCTU will
need to avoid the
temptation of potential corporatist deals associated with
an Mbeki-style
elite transition.
Still ahead on the immediate
horizon are major socio-political
upheavals, ranging from renewed fights for
control over both the ruling
party and opposition, to intensified austerity
once the inflationary era
subsides, in the context of potentially voracious
South African subimperial
accumulation.
International
solidarity, of the sort COSATU has begun, will enhance
the survival capacity
of Zimbabwean labor (and its left civil-society
allies) in the face of legal
and extralegal repression. The eventual success
of a mass-based and
labor-led movement at one and the same time for
democracy and against
neoliberalism and imperialism would have the most
significant consequences
for all of Southern Africa.
Notes for Further Reading
Amid a barrage of largely shallow, mainstream-oriented publications
about
Zimbabwe and especially Robert Mugabe over the past five years, there
emerged a diverse and largely progressive set of book-length studies on
contemporary politics and political economy, including D. Moore & T.
Leddy,
eds., Zimbabwe: Crisis and Transition (Pietermaritzburg: University
of
KwaZulu-Natal Press, forthcoming); B. Raftopoulos & T. Savage,
Zimbabwe:
Injustice and Political Reconciliation (Cape Town: Institute for
Justice and
Reconciliation, 2005); P. Bond & M. Manyanya, Zimbabwe's
Plunge: Exhausted
Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social
Justice (London: Merlin
Press; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal
Press; and Harare:
Weaver Press, 2003); H. Campbell, Reclaiming Zimbabwe:
The Exhaustion of the
Patriarchal Model of Liberation (Cape Town: David
Philip; and Trenton:
Africa World Press, 2003); A. Hammer, B. Raftopoulos
& S. Jensen, eds.,
Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land,
State and Nation in the
Context of Crisis (Harare: Weaver Press, 2003); M.
Manyanya, ed., NEPAD's
Zimbabwe Test: Why the New Partnership for Africa's
Development is Already
Failing (Harare: Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and
Development, 2003); S.
Dansereu, ed., special issue of Labor, Capital and
Society 33, no. 2 (2001);
B. Rutherford Working on the Margins: Black
Workers, White Farmers in
Post-Colonial Zimbabwe (Harare: Weaver Press,
2001); J. Alexander et al,
Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the
"Dark Forests" of Matabeleland
(Oxford: James Currey, 2001); and T.
Bowyer-Bower & C. Stoneman, Land Reform
in Zimbabwe: Constraints and
Prospects (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing
Company, 2003);
The
most important trade union compilations are B. Raftopoulos & L.
Sachikonye, eds., Striking Back: The Labour Movement and the Post-Colonial
State in Zimbabwe 1980-2000 (Harare: Weaver Press, 2001); and P. Yeros,
Labour Struggles for Alternative Economics in Zimbabwe: Trade Union
Nationalism and Internationalism in a Global Era (Harare: Southern African
Political Economic Series Monograph Series, 2001).