All eyes on Zimbabwe's new 'workers' party'
By Patrick Bond
JOHANNESBURG — The Shona-language slogan of the popular new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), has spread far and wide throughout the countryside:
Chinja! Maitiro! (Change! In the way things are done!)
Maitiro chinja! (The way things are done must change!)
Chihurumende bzisa! (The government — sweep it away!)
Hezcoko! Bwa! (We are coming! There we are!)
Unotya here? Aiwa!
Change is urgently needed in Zimbabwe. The country is bedevilled by a fuel shortage, the army is overcommitted in a hopeless war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zimbabweans grieve for lost family and friends in the horrific AIDS pandemic. The economy suffers from 49% inflation and soaring interest rates, and is losing businesses and shedding jobs at a rapid rate (unemployment hit 50% in 1999). Income inequality has risen to amongst the world's worst, especially with respect to control of good farming land.
Rife with corruption, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government, led by President Robert Mugabe, seems to have finally reached it death-throes. The country's 12 million people appear restless and often furious.
The MDC, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, the popular trade union leader, may be on the verge of winning a majority in the national parliamentary election scheduled for late April. [The results of an opinion poll conducted by Gallup International, released on March 10, found that 63% of respondents thought it was "time for a change" while 36% felt Mugabe's ruling party should continue in power.]
A February referendum on a new constitution promoted by Mugabe revealed both the impressive mobilisation capability of the MDC and the apathy of the peasantry that has normally championed ZANU-PF. The referendum was defeated with 55% against. It was Mugabe's first electoral defeat.
While the next presidential election is not until 2002, 76-year-old Mugabe has announced that he will not stand again. There is no obvious successor within Mugabe's fractious, crisis-ridden party.
The 48-year-old former mineworker Tsvangirai visited Johannesburg in early March to seek support from the huge Zimbabwean expatriate community. In two well-attended meetings he also eased the fears of South Africa's business elite — the conservative Business Day newspaper recently condemned the MDC as "unproven".
The apparent president-in-waiting has argued for the need to quickly build a broad coalition, drawing support from beyond the trade union movement he has headed since 1989.
Some fear that by bringing Zimbabwean, South African and international capital on board — in advisory positions (including a top Confederation of Zimbabwe Industry deal-maker, Eddie Cross) and also as donors — Tsvangirai will repeat the wretched experience of Zambia.
Zambian trade union leader Frederick Chiluba's multi-class alliance won the 1991 election against veteran nationalist Kenneth Kaunda and quickly applied a neo-liberal economic policies with even worse results than those of his predecessor.
Zimbabwe's other two significant opposition movements line up far to the right of the MDC. In February, a collection of octogenarian, 1960s-'70s nationalists — Ndabaningi Sithole, Abel Muzorewa and even Rhodesia's last white minority rule leader Ian Smith, back from political retirement — launched a "United Democratic Front". The other is the Democratic Union of charismatic former ZANU-PF activist — now self-described liberal — Margaret Dongo (one of just three non-ZANU-PF MPs), whose supporters are quickly shifting to the MDC.
For Mugabe, the MDC's popularity has occasioned a renewed round of bashing the few thousand white farmers and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Tsvangirai — accurately — derides this as hollow political posturing.
Mugabe's capitalist road
Two decades ago, Zimbabwe's liberation from 200,000 white, colonial-settler Rhodesians was won after a brutal war (with 40,000 black casualties) waged by guerillas with mass support from peasants. Mugabe and his on-again, off-again ally Joshua Nkomo (who died in 1999) established a nationalist ideology with "socialist" overtones.
However, ZANU-PF's status-quo development strategy failed to raise living standards, aside initially from a few rural clinics and schools and the growth of a 200,000-strong, lower middle-class state bureaucracy.
The adoption of a structural adjustment program authored by the IMF and World Bank during the 1990s, compounded by two severe droughts, set the country on a raw and often chaotic capitalist road. Zimbabwe became disastrously dependent upon World Bank and IMF loans and neoliberal policy advice. From 1991, living standards plummeted and the de-industrialisation of Zimbabwe's once-strong manufacturing sector caused huge job cuts.
Between 1989-92, Tsvangirai opposed the structural adjustment from a classical leftist position. When the state reacted with brute force (he spent two weeks in jail in 1989 for defending student protests. In 1992, a peaceful protest was broken up and organisers arrested), Tsvangirai shifted into conciliatory gear. In an alternative economic plan issued by the unions in 1996, Tsvangirai argued that the government's free-market economic program was "necessary but insufficient".
After 1992, Tsvangirai advocated tripartite bargaining fora (with big government and big business). This also proved fruitless. When a deep economic crisis began in late 1997, amplified by Mugabe's political gaffes, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) chose to pursue a more sustained attack on ZANU-PF's political power.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe's middle-class intelligentsia — which in Zambia had helped shift Chiluba's Movement for Multiparty Democracy from political liberalism to economic neo-liberalism — began to self-destruct. One reflection of this was the ease with which, in the course the debate over constitutional reform in 1999, Mugabe was able to pick off several key academic opponents, who were once left-leaning critics, and turn them around to become into ZANU-PF boosters.
With the weakness of this layer and the strength of its backing from the ZCTU, over the past two years the MDC has come together as Zimbabwe's "Workers' Party", which is its colloquial name.
Weaknesses
The prime electoral challenge will be to overcome the rural and liberation movement loyalties to Mugabe, and patriarchal/ethnic traditions.
Moreover, the MDC must get permission from white farmers to gain access to the 2 million farm workers employed on Zimbabwe's 3000 large plantations. This may result in pressure for the MDC to soft-peddle land redistribution demands. [A good sign is the appointment of Tendai Biti as head of the MDC's land policy desk. Biti is a left-wing lawyer, formerly of the small but influential International Socialists movement.]
Likewise, the movement has a desperate need for funds to run a national electoral campaign, which may make concessions to business interests seem an attractive thing to do.
What degree of ideological flexibility will be required to add peasant votes and capitalist bucks to the MDC's core union and social movement networks? Given the party's lack of skilled politicians and relatively short, undeveloped program, the MDC's "social democratic" line is dependent largely on Tsvangirai's enormous personal influence.
Visit the MDC's web site at <http://www.mdc.co.zw/introframes.html>.
[Patrick Bond's Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa has just been by published by Pluto Press, London. His 1998 book, Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment, is available from Africa World Press at <http://www.africanworld.com>.]