by Sacha Ismail
On Tuesday 3 April, trucks of riot police drove through the Zimbabwean capital Harare, and military helicopters hovered over workers’ districts, as a two day general strike called by the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions over wage rises and price increases — and against Robert Mugabe’s increasingly dictatorial regime — began. Soldiers with automatic weapons were posted at the intersections of the city's main industrial area.
The strike, and the regime’s show of force against it, are the latest episode in the raging class struggle that has engulfed Zimbabwe since Mugabe’s (dubious) re-election in 2002. In 2005, over 30,000 arrests were made and hundreds of informal urban dwellings and stalls demolished in “Operation Take Out the Trash”, destroying the livelihood of tens of thousands of workers in the informal economy — who had been increasingly turning to the trade unions. In September 2006, hundreds of trade unionists and human rights activists were arrested and badly beaten following a demonstration against shortages. In the middle of March, the security services violently attacked opposition leaders and raided the ZCTU’s office to seize materials about the general strike.
Zimbabwean workers face something like 80% unemployment, the world’s highest inflation rate at 1,700%, and acute shortages of food, medicines, petrol and hard currency. On 5 February, teachers across Zimbabwe launched an indefinite general strike over pay, joining doctors and nurses already taking action against poverty pay. Teachers are paid just £9 a month, one fifth of the government's own figures for an income on which a family can meet its most basic needs, and are often unable to even afford the bus fare to work. Even substantial wage rises conceded to various groups of workers by the regime have been drowned by out-of-control inflation.
In this match-to-gas atmosphere, the regime is heavily reliant on the military’s support to “keep order”. But even the recent 800% rise in army pensions and the relatively high wages of soldiers (army privates are paid twice as much as teachers) are not preventing chronic desertion and absenteeism from the armed forces. Soldiers are increasingly unwilling to defend the government against the people whose poverty they share.
For now, it looks as if repression has combined with the desperate situation facing most Zimbabweans to limit the impact of the general strike. That only strengthens the need for solidarity from the labour movement internationally.
Even if Mugabe’s craving for power has made him delusional, more sober figures in the Zimbabwean bourgeoisie must be aware that his regime cannot hang on indefinitely. One danger is that of “regime change from above” — the kind of plan put forward by South African prime minister Thabo Mbeki, who is manoeuvring to have Zimbabwe's ruling party, Zanu-PF, replace Mugabe with a leader who will assure stability and be willing to deal with international capital and its power brokers. Mbeki’s plan would involve a national unity government between anti-Mugabe elements in Zanu and the main opposition party, the neo-liberal Movement for Democratic Change (which many of the trade unions unfortunately support: MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is the former head of the ZCTU). Zimbabwean socialists, such as the Zimbabwe International Socialist Organisation (linked to the British SWP), have sought to mobilise workers “against dictatorship and neoliberalism” — against the regime but independently of the bourgeois opposition. They, along with the whole Zimbabwean labour movement, need support and solidarity.
Hands off Raymond Majongwe!
Raymond Majongwe, general secretary of the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe, was kidnapped at gunpoint on the afternoon of 3 April, after he left the PTUZ offices in Harare to buy lunch.
Majongwe represents the PTUZ on the ZCTU general council. (Incidentally, the UK government refused to issue him a visa to visit the UK to talk to other trade unionists and activists last year...) His colleagues only realised he had been abducted after he failed to appear for a meeting of the union’s national executive. When they went to the shopping centre to collect his car, a street vendor told them that unknown assailants had accosted Majongwe, with one of them brandishing a pistol. He was bundled into a car and driven away before anyone could do anything.
The PTUZ has informed the police, but for obvious reasons is not expecting much help from them.
The PTUZ took the lead in the teachers' strike last month, pushing less radical teachers’ organisations into following its example. So alarmed was Mugabe’s education ministry by its call for mass stayaways during the ZCTU general strike that it announced the school term would be shortened by two days in order to save face!
