population. Shop shelves are empty, unemployment is 80%, even those Reports …trom Zimbabwe highlight the deepening crisis there, affecting every aspect of life.
Zimbabwe's main bakery recently announced that it had shut its branch Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second biggest city and sent home hundreds of workers at its main factory in the capital, Harare. The closure followed the government's admission that it could not afford to pay for wheat from Mozambique.
The runaway effects of inflation, standing over 7600%, the shortages of food, water and the power cuts are blighting the lives of the population. Shop shelves are empty, unemployment is 80%, even those who have jobs, cannot afford the rising bus fares and have to walk miles to work.
Four million Zimbabweans have left the country in search of jobs, most of them going to South Africa. Many of those that remain are dependent on money and more food parcels from their relatives abroad.
While the governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe admits the government is unable to provide adequate food supplies or maintain basic services, he demands that the unions accept a wage freeze in the face of skyrocketing prices. This is consistent with the neo- liberal programme he is carrying out.
Mugabe, using presidential powers declares a wage freeze but his own salary is
La billion raisea lo over Zimbabwean dollars a year!
The government tries to enforce price control by supermarkets, shops and warehouses and force the owners to sell produce far below the cost of replacing stock. The response of many business owners is to shut rather than face huge losses. This policy of the government will lead to further inflation as goods become scarcer.
Zimbabwe now has the world's lowest life expectancy, 34 years for women and 37 years for men.
Key events in Zimbabwe's history continue to influence the situation today.
Southern Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence, was a white settler colony. The blacks were denied democratic rights, the land was segregated.
In 1979 at independence, 6,000 white farmers retained 39% of the land, while one million black householders were consigned to 41% of the land, most of it marginal. In some areas more than 40% of men did not have any land at all.
Discriminated against in education and employment as well as other walks of life, Africans swelled the ranks of the African nationalist movements that sprang up in the 50's and 60's, fighting for democratic rights and independence.
This struggle developed The runaway effects of inflation, standing at over 7600%, the shortages of food, water and the power cuts are blighting the lives of the with jobs, cannot afford bus fares and have to walk miles to work.
into armed resistance and by the early 1970s guerrillas trained outside the borders of the colony. Members of the nationalist movement, the Zimbabwe African National Union ( ZANU) returned and began the guerrilla war. The Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), the rival nationalist movement played a much smaller role in the war. The guerrilla army was drawn mainly from the ence.
When it became clear at the end of the 70s to the imperialists that the Smith regime was losing, they became alarmed that South Africa, where they had huge investments, would be under threat of armed struggle. They pressured Mozambique and Zambia to deny ZANU its military bases on their territories unless they took part in negotiations to end the war.
In 1979 a coalition of ZANU and ZAPU, the Patriotic Front(PF) came to Lancaster House. Expelled from their bases, they were forced into negotiating transition to neo-colonialism. They had to abandon their key demand for the land and agree to a willing buyer willing seller as the basis for any transfer of land.
The seriousness of the economic situation today underlines the failures of the neo-liberal policies the government has been pursuing since the late 80s. With Britain reneging its promise to give financial support to the new state, Zimbabwe had to turn to creditors to enable it to provide free schooling and healthcare, social welfare and land to the people.
In 1990, in exchange for loans from the IMF and World Bank, the governmillion hectares of land-, approximately 90% of white commercial land and redistributed it to 127,000 peasant households and 8000 capitalist farmers.
The black elite in the government and its supporters appropriated some of the land for itself. The government had abandoned the ESAP just before the land occupations and balance of payments support from the IMF was suspended and the economy continued on a rapid decline.
The US and Britain, which imposed Zimbabwe, have demanded that before they lift these and resume aid, the government fully implement the ESAP under IMF superviAn opposition movement, the Movement for Democratic Change(MDC), a coalition of trade unions and civic groups succeeded in organising the population to reject a draft constitution in 2000 that left untouched the vast powers that Mugabe
president wielded. However, it lost the election later that year to the government party.
One of the reasons for its failure to win the election was that it had joined with the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions in an alliance against the land acquisition programme of the government and antagonised the Structural peasants, who supported the Programme programme. The rift (ESAP) which led to cuts in between the peasants and devaluation, the liberalisa- ened the hand of the governAlthough the peasantry formed the base of the lanc acquisition movement, the governing party and the
black elite retained control Land occupations intensi- of it and ensured that land redistributed to them was of tial and had limited access to irrigation structure.
The peasantry, who constitute at least 60% of the population, do not have the
minimum of organised
structure to have any influence over the post-redistribution phase of agrarian
reform. However, the movement did succeed in compelling the expropriation of 90% of commercial farmland and broadening land
ownership.
The country is preparing
for its 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections.
The opposition party, the
MDC's economic policy is
neo-liberal, pro-privatisation. The great tragedy is
that most workers are not aware of the MDC's policles.
The ruling party, ZANU
PF, does not have deep ideological differences with the
opposition party, the MDC.
It however retains the support of the peasantry.
Imperialism seeks to
restore the IMF and World
Bank's hold on Zimbabwe's
economy. For this to occur,
it sees Mugabe's replacement as essential, either
through a putsch in the
increasingly divided governing party, ZANU-PF, or a
power sharing transitional
government, which includes
members of the opposition
MDC.
It has become increasingly
irritated with the failure of
Thabo Mbeki, president of
South Africa to resolve the
stand off between ZANUPF and the MDC to bring
the two sides together.
The vital step for
Zimbabwe's workers is to
the transform the trade
unions into more democratic, united and accountable organisations and to
build a political united democratic front of all progressive sections of urban and
rural working people.