TENS OF THOUSANDS of workers and youth have marched to President Mugabe’s office and residence and say that they will stay there till he resigns and new elections are called.
This revolutionary mass action comes just days after the Zimbabwe army general staff organised a coup in response to 93-year-old Mugabe’s declaration that he favoured his wife Grace as his successor and then sacked his deputy.
The army coup is an attempt to head off a workers revolution since Grace Mugabe as president is an act of incitement as far as the working class is concerned. Her presidency, along with the plans of her supporters, would see Zimbabwe become an even more corrupt state than neighbouring South Africa which is under the heel of the ANC’s Jacob Zuma for the benefit of world capitalism.
The military says it will advise the public on the outcome of talks ‘as soon as possible’. If Mugabe will not go, there is no doubt that he will be put out by a workers uprising. The major issue is that the black masses of Zimbabwe have still not been able to get their hands on the land, and the enormous natural resources of the country, and because of this large numbers of Zimbabweans still go hungry.
In colonial Southern Rhodesia the law was that 50% of the land was for white settlers, 30% for Africans, and 20% for companies and the colonial government. The development of the settler agricultural economy was based on the widespread expropriation of land and the forced removal of the black population to reserves.
The uprising of the black masses led to the 1980 Lancaster House Agreement and a black government that could only acquire land on a ‘willing seller, willing buyer, fair market’ basis for the first ten years of independence. This stopped land reform. Only about 50,000 households were settled in the first decade of independence.
After the end of the Lancaster House Agreement in 1990 Britain cancelled its promised funding of the land purchasing programme, and Land Acts were enacted that protected commercial agricultural production for export and neglected food production for the home population.
Land reform was limited to government officials and supporters grabbing portions of land for themselves to produce tobacco for export. Today about five million of the country’s population of 14 million are in need of food assistance.
The mass movement of millions of workers against Mugabe will continue after he is removed and its political leadership will be strengthened as the hundreds of thousands who were forced to leave the country and go to South Africa and other countries to seek work, return home to join the fight.
The way forward is to build the revolutionary party to bring down not just Mugabe but his bourgeois regime and to go forward to a Workers Republic. This will nationalise the land and the major industries, giving the land to the rural population, and also organising giant collective farms to produce the foodstuffs that are needed by the masses.
The major industries and the banks must be expropriated and put under workers management so that a planned economy can be developed to break the imperialist stranglehold that the country has been put into.
There is not the slightest doubt that the revolutionary movement that is developing in Zimbabwe will spread like wildfire over the border into South Africa, creating the conditions for a working class revolution to remove the Zuma comprador regime and bring in a workers and small farmers government to get rid of capitalism.
This is a revolutionary movement of the working class that once it explodes will spread throughout Africa. It will create the conditions to unite the working class of the continent in a struggle to smash capitalism and imperialism and replace both with the Socialist United States of Africa, putting an end to imperialist exploitation throughout the vast continent.
For the first time for over a century of imperialist domination the resources of the continent will then be used to benefit its people, and create a new Africa. There is no doubt that this perspective will inspire millions of workers and youth to lead the struggle to win Africa back for its peoples.