AS IS to be expected the imperialists, with Britain in the lead, are engaging in an economic blockade, black propaganda, etc to get rid of Zimbabwe’s 84-year-old President Robert Mugabe, who is standing for re-election on March 29, and replace him with someone who will obediently do their bidding.
A huge obstacle to their plans is millions of workers, youth, small farmers and rural poor whose families fought in the armed struggle in the 1970s to liberate their country from imperialism and white minority rule.
Hundreds died in that struggle before victory, but then Mugabe made an agreement with British Tory premier Margaret Thatcher at Lancaster House in 1980, which allowed the multinationals to keep the mines while the white farmers kept the best land.
In the early years, the ZANU-PF government brought in free healthcare and education, and some welfare provisions, but did nothing about the land.
In the mid-1990s, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund imperialist agencies decided to turn the screws on Zimbabwe and Mugabe was a willing collaborator in implementing the IMF’s ‘Structural Adjustment Programme’. Mugabe ended free healthcare and education, and began to privatise the state sector of the economy.
The trade unions, in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU), organised national strikes against Mugabe’s austerity measures in the late 1990s, which inevitably took on a political character.
Morgan Tsvangarai, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Presidential candidate today, became an active trade unionist in the mining industry and from 1988 until 1999 was the General Secretary of the ZCTU, which led these mass strikes. He stepped down in 1999 to lead the newly-formed MDC.
Facing the challenge of the MDC in elections in 2000, when his ZANU-PF ruling party was very unpopular, Mugabe announced his ‘land reforms’. He said he would take land from white farmers and redistribute it to landless villagers.
By the 2002 election, the MDC emerged with majority support in the urban working-class, while ZANU-PF still had the backing of most of the rural population. The MDC refused to back land reform because it was courting the white commercial farmers.
The third Presidential candidate in Saturday’s polling is Simba Makoni, who was in Mugabe’s ZANU-PF government from 1980 and was the Finance Minister before being sacked by the President in 2002. He has no party organisation, but the British bourgeois press praises him.
Sections of the ZANU-PF membership are expected to vote for him and he has the support of a dissident faction of the MDC.
With an annual inflation rate of 150,000 per cent, empty shops, 80 per cent unemployment in the townships, and fuel and power shortages, workers in Zimbabwe will vote against Mugabe.
The only candidate standing with any record of struggling to defend the working class is the MDC leader. A vote for Tsvangarai will be a vote for jobs and trade union rights, and to oust Mugabe’s corrupt ZANU-PF clique.
Tsvangarai describes the MDC as ‘a social democratic party’. The MDC says it will work to ‘build a strong economy, using market principles with strong redistributive characteristics and carefully targeted state-intervention policies’. On land reform, it says ‘the historical imbalance in the pattern of land distribution must be addressed urgently’ and that it will carry this out ‘on the basis of need and ability’.
Mugabe is hinting that, whatever happens at the ballot box, he will not hand over to Tsvangarai. With this and people starving, revolutionary action by workers is needed to put an end to the economic catastrophe.
The MDC leadership is both unwilling and unable to lead the workers and rural masses to take power and establish a workers’ and small farmers’ government to expropriate foreign multinationals, white farmers and big business, and begin a socialist transformation in Zimbabwe and the rest of southern Africa.
The most urgent task facing workers and youth in Zimbabwe is to build a new revolutionary party, the section of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International.
