Challenges face new workers' party in Zimbabwe
By Patrick Bond
HARARE — The March 1 announcement by Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) secretary-general Morgan Tsvangirai that his federation's executive has mandated the creation of a "political formation" in the interests of workers has raised spirits throughout this southern African country. ZCTU leaders and progressive civil society representatives met in late February and declared the need for "a strong, democratic, popularly driven and organised movement of the people".
Faced with unending state mismanagement and economic conditions deteriorating daily, more than 60% of Zimbabwe's 12 million people live below the poverty line. Most striking has been the emergence of vast, still-widening inequalities — not just benefiting the 80,000 white settlers who remained after the country won independence in 1980, but also a few hundred thousand-strong black financial, commercial and political-bureaucratic elite.
A first step towards the embryonic workers' party will be negotiations with a major left-leaning network — the National Constitutional Assembly (which Tsvangirai chairs) — as well as with a small political party, the Zimbabwe Union of Democrats, whose fiery leader, Margaret Dongo, probably had plans to challenge the presidency of 75-year-old incumbent Robert Mugabe in the February 2000 elections.
Tsvangirai announced that, should the party be established, he will resign from his ZCTU position. ZCTU president Gibson Sibanda is also likely to step down in order to lend more weight to the new party.
Zimbabwe has seen several opposition parties since 1980. None has posed a threat to Mugabe, especially in the wake of the 1987 unity accord which merged the two liberation movements, Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) — which had majority support among the Shona ethnic group and was aided during the 1970s liberation war by China — and retiring vice-president Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) — which has a base in the Ndebele ethnic group and was backed by the Soviet Union. The merger created the ZANU-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).
Previous parties tried to establish a right-wing presence, capitalising on the contradiction between ZANU-PF's "socialist" rhetoric and its leadership's bourgeoisification.
Dubious leftism
Mugabe's opponents were uniformly unsuccessful. Today, ZANU-PF holds 97% of parliamentary seats. Apathy has characterised the two national elections since 1990, with only just over half the eligible electorate voting — down from more than 90% in 1980 and 1985.
Notwithstanding his late 1998 claim that socialism will be revived and his regular denunciation of international financial institutions, Mugabe's record as a leftist is dubious. During the 1980s he made few economic interventions and allowed white ownership and control of key corporate sectors to remain virtually unchanged from the days of conservative Rhodesian leader Ian Smith.
Whenever left-wing opposition appeared, Mugabe invariably attacked with left-sounding sloganeering. He once calling student protesters "agents of apartheid".
With Zimbabwe stagnating, ZANU-PF leaders authorised the 1990 imposition of a disastrous World Bank structural adjustment program, which over the next five years destroyed 40% of Zimbabwe's once formidable manufacturing output, lowered workers' standard of living by a similar figure and reversed the impressive primary health care and educational achievements of the previous decade.
A series of popular challenges to Mugabe's rule has made the emergence of a coherent progressive political party more possible.
These challenges include the birth of a highly conscious, though numerically small, feminist movement in the mid-1980s (when women were being rounded up randomly as suspected prostitutes); several surges of student revolt beginning in the late 1980s; a tiny but vocal gay rights movement that has bravely challenged Mugabe's notorious homophobia; increasingly confident human rights groups which in 1996 reminded the nation of ZANU's oppression of the Ndebele people in the early 1980s; movements of land-starved peasants willing to invite state repression by invading commercial farmland over the past two years; urban civic associations with grievances over declining municipal services (deteriorating hygiene and water services led to a cholera outbreak which killed nearly 100 urban Zimbabweans in early 1999); dissatisfied liberation war veterans who in 1997 took to the streets; and a revitalised trade union movement.
Strike upsurge
Though still poorly organised and fraught with divisions promoted by Mugabe's labour ministers, the ZCTU benefited from a dramatic 1996-98 upsurge in strikes. Tsvangirai and Sibanda quickly became the country's key extra-parliamentary leaders.
Mugabe responded with varying degrees of cooption and repression — the war vets were won over with generous pension payouts, and Mugabe has loudly announced massive land reform programs, but always backing down behind closed doors in the face of opposition from western governments and international financial institutions.
Following the first mass workers' stayaway in late 1997, Tsvangirai was badly beaten by thugs. In March 1998, the ZCTU's main regional office was razed by arsonists. At the end of 1998, Mugabe issued an apparently unconstitutional presidential decree banning strikes.
In January, after a newspaper reported an alleged coup attempt by a dissident army faction had been foiled, Mugabe endorsed defence minister Moven Mahachi's decision to illegally detain and torture two journalists, Mark Chavunduka and Ray Choto, and the brief detention of the paper's publisher, Clive Wilson.
The potential for drawing together the fragmented opposition has become more realistic as disaster after disaster has emerged. These include: the heavy-handed denial of civil liberties; ongoing economic woes (especially renewed waves of retrenchments and dramatic price increases following two speculator-driven currency crashes in November 1997 and August 1998); growing disgust at corruption (a key ZANU-PF patron, Roger Boka, wrecked his own banking-tobacco empire, resorted to issuing US$50 million in bogus state bonds and was being bailed out by the state until he fled Zimbabwe in early 1998); and Mugabe's extremely unpopular decision last October to send 6000 troops (many of whom are returning now in body bags) to support Laurent Kabila's government in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in part to defend his cronies' investments in the DRC.
The new party and its likely allies appear to have sufficient popular support to win state power — if Mugabe allows free and fair elections.
Uncertainties
But there are uncertainties. ZANU-PF has enjoyed extraordinary loyalty from the peasants, over half the population, thanks to the construction of rural clinics and schools during the 1980s. This year's excessive rains may generate further opportunities for patronage in the form of food relief and seed packages prior to the next planting season.
On the other hand, roaring inflation and pressure from the IMF to lift price controls on staple goods and impose a new value added tax in rural areas early next year will erode that loyalty.
More worrying for Tsvangirai is the relatively thin layer of opposition activists who have explicit mandates and organisational grounding. Many of Harare's dissident political and NGO cadres, who best articulate the broader critique of ZANU-PF rule, are from petty bourgeois backgrounds.
With likely financial support from big business, the liberal wing of the opposition may come to play a dominant role in initiatives to rewrite the country's 1979 Lancaster House constitution as well as any popular-front electoral effort.
This would not be unprecedented. In neighbouring Zambia, trade union leader Frederick Chiluba was nurtured by conservative forces (including the US government) and supplied with a healthy bank account. Chiluba easily won the 1991 election against the venerable nationalist Kenneth Kaunda, who had ruled since 1964.
Chiluba soon imposed unpopular economic policies that killed the jobs of 75% of Zambia's one million formal-sector workers. Support for Kaunda's party rapidly revived, and it could well have proven overwhelming in 1996 had Chiluba not prohibited Kaunda from standing again through a questionable constitutional amendment.
When Tsvangirai took charge of the ZCTU a decade ago, he was a "new left" socialist, and much of his early leadership was devoted to ineffectual but spirited attacks on structural adjustment.
During the 1990s, suffering from a dramatic downturn in membership as retrenchments soared, the ZCTU explored "corporatist" relations with big business on several fronts (housing, health care, pensions and social security) but never achieved the desired "social contract" with the arrogant ruling party.
However, in declaring his executive's support for a new party, Tsvangirai also announced that the ZCTU had walked out of tripartite economic policy negotiations.
Yet many of the ZCTU's technical criticisms of structural adjustment have faded, and one 1996 alternative economic policy document even termed the orthodox strategy "necessary but insufficient".
Economic policy changes are required for Zimbabwe. A challenge to status quo power relations might include: imposition of capital controls; repudiation of the massive World Bank-IMF debt on grounds that its structural adjustment medicine worsened Zimbabwe's economic ills; a roll-back of trade liberalisation (particularly in light of South Africa favouring a free trade deal with the European Union over regional fair trade); relaxation of the current tight monetary policy; and a dramatic restructuring of state spending and investment to favour neglected basic infrastructure, public works, housing and social services.
Establishing a program with a strong bias towards the urban and rural poor, amidst pressure from vocal liberals and big business, will test Tsvangirai's mettle.
Whether the new party can quickly assemble enough democratic leaders, activists and technicians is also a big question. But there appear to be sufficient time and energy, with excellent resonance at grassroots level, for Tsvangirai, Sibanda and the ZCTU to risk taking a stance for radical political and economic change.
[Patrick Bond teaches at Wits University in Johannesburg. He is author of Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment, Trenton, Africa World Press, 1998.]