Introduction
The structural weaknesses of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in the early 1990s, especially its dependence on US and European donors and its exclusive focus on building organisational structures among formal workers, at a time of increasing unemployment, were to take their toll on the labour centre. In the second half of the 1990s, the ZCTU underwent a qualitative transformation in political perspective and strategy, even as it succeeded in incorporating public sector unions, built alliances with other civic organisations, and stepped up strike action, to unprecedented levels. This is the irony that has so deeply marked the labour centre, and goes a long way to explain its downfall.
The diagnosis by no means underestimates the coercive strategies of the state and the intransigence of capital in the course of liberalisation. But these are the givens that any labour centre must be prepared to confront; what must concern us is precisely the ability of trade unionism, in the specific context of peripheral capitalism, to gain ideological and strategic autonomy from the state, capital, and donors. This is the real challenge, and it is on this that trade unionism must be judged.
At the turn of the century, Brian Raftopoulos (2001, 24) noted that:
… surveying the last twenty years of labour history it is clear that the labour movement in Zimbabwe has made remarkable progress. Moving from a patronised wing of the ruling party, it has provided the catalyst and the organisational framework for the growth of a powerful political opposition now challenging for state power.
It will be argued here that the above assessment overstates the success of trade unionism to devise strategies congruent with the realities of a semi-proletarianised worforce, as well as the deep qualitative changes that the ZCTU underwent. By the end of the decade, the ‘oppositional voice’ of the labour centre was no longer targeted on production, while its notion of ‘democratisation’ became stuck in the rut of ‘regime change’. As new social forces emerged in the countryside to reclaim a radical national liberation project, and as the ruling party itself entered a period of ideological reorientation, the labour centre proved incapable of re-evaluating and adjusting to the new realities. This laid the basis for an enduring polarisation between radical nationalism and neoliberalism, the latter being adopted by the MDC. In the process, the labour centre was emptied out and practically demobilised.1
Appealing for national dialogue, 1995–1997
By 1995, the ZCTU's political unionism was bearing fruit. Aside from its recruitment strategies, the status of the ZCTU in national life was benefiting from the growing discontent with the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). The ZCTU managed to harness the popular tide and organise, articulate, and lead the resistance to the state, capital, and ESAP. Despite its low level of unionisation, the centre enjoyed widespread legitimacy in national life as the leader and mouthpiece of opposition. In early 1995, in the midst of retrenchments, price rises, and an impeding Drought Levy, the ZCTU issued an ultimatum to the government to withdraw the Levy or face nationwide industrial action. This resistance, compounded with the fear on the part of government that the labour movement was on its way to forming a political party, succeeded in bringing President Mugabe and the labour leaders into dialogue in March 1995 for the first time in the decade. The meeting signalled a thawing of relations, culminating in an invitation to President Mugabe to be the guest of honour at the May Day 1995 celebrations and to open the ZCTU Congress in Mutare in August, as well as to Labour Minister Nathan Shamuyarira to adjourn the Congress.
But 1995 was also the year in which the ZCTU changed strategy, with the objective now being dialogue with the state and the international financial institutions (IFIs). Whereas the May Day theme in 1991 had been ‘Liberalisation or Liberation’, by 1995 it had become ‘Progress through Co-operation, Participation, Involvement’. In the same spirit, the 1995 Congress in Mutare was billed as the ‘Beyond ESAP’ Congress, where the Beyond ESAP (1996) draft document was adopted and its call for national dialogue issued. ‘This theme’, said ZCTU President Gibson Sibanda to his May Day audience (The Worker/TW 24: May 1995):
… reflects our belief that for us to be effective in representing our constituencies, we have to be involved through participatory democracy in decision-making … Rather than resort to ad hoc consultations that have characterised our relationship with government, we need a more permanent institutional framework through which issues of development should be discussed by government and representatives of civil society.
Yet, the rapprochement was less profound than it appeared. Industrial conflict persisted into the period of dialogue. The government passed the Economic Processing Zones (EPZ) Act in 1995, thereby suspending the application of the Labour Relations Act (LRA) in EPZs, and dealing a blow to the labour movement. This action was reinforced in 1996 when the government announced special regulations to govern the terms and conditions of employment in EPZs. The regulations allowed for long working hours, as well as work on Sundays, holidays, and at night at normal pay rates; allowed employers to fire workers at will and deny them legal representation in case of dispute; and prohibited strikes (TW 70: July 1999).
Conflict persisted in the public sector as well. In fact, the biggest post-independence strike occurred in this period. On 19 August 1996, a walkout by nurses in Chinhoyi triggered a nationwide civil servants' strike. Festering grievances over low pay and authoritarian industrial relations erupted when the public sector was awarded a 6% cost of living adjustment as compared to the wage increments above the 22% inflation rate that had been secured in the private sector during collective bargaining. At the height of the strike, the Public Service Association (PSA) formally affiliated to the ZCTU. The civil servants resumed work on 5 September, but without the dispute having been resolved. Subsequently, temperatures rose again over lack of progress and distrust of the intentions of government. In late October, nurses and doctors renewed the job action, this time staying away for several weeks. The temperature rose further in mid November, when the ZCTU, which until then had been playing an advisory and mediating role, called for a General Strike, the first in the post-independence period, in an attempt to put pressure on the government to resolve the dispute. In the event, the strike call was not heeded by workers, however, and this in turn caused controversy within the ZCTU. As it emerged, there had been insufficient consultation between the centre and its affiliates, as well as between affiliates and their memberships. The leadership of the ZCTU was taken to task for failing to ensure consultation, and the movement as a whole had once again come face to face with its weaknesses (TW 42: Dec/Jan 1997; see also Behind the Strike 1996).
In October of the same year, a new labour centre was formed, the Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Union (ZFTU), with the tacit endorsement of the ruling party – though it was not actually registered by the government until July 1998. While it was proving at the time to be a ‘passing nuisance’, as Tsvangirai put it, it is noteworthy that the means by which the alternative centre sought to legitimate itself entailed an accusation of the ZCTU as ‘donor driven’. A statement (TW 41: November 1996) issued by the ZFTU claimed that the ZCTU:
… has been operating under funding donors, particularly the Americans who by and large have an influence over the activities of the centre. The ZCTU programmes and actions have clearly been donor driven instead of worker initiated. This has resulted in the ZCTU becoming an ivory tower, neglecting the aspirations of the workers in Zimbabwe.
… we, as the ZCTU, have enjoyed solidarity from our international trade union fraternity. We will not apologise for this. After all, it allowed us to build our capacity. We have come to accept that this solidarity will not be extended in perpetuity, and thus, we have been working towards self-reliance since 1990. Although we receive this support, we have never been influenced in designing our policies and programmes and in executing our activities.
Yet, while the ruling party sought a smokescreen for its own liberation project gone far astray, it is true that the ZCTU, while not being ‘driven’ by foreign interests, was being transformed by its collision with both the neocolonial state and the labour imperialism of Northern-based trade unions. The dialogue which the ZCTU sought in 1995 was on terms that were much more palatable to the state, capital, Northern labour, and the IFIs. The dialogue was not to be on matters of national sovereignty, or worker control of production, or land redistribution. The ZCTU was no longer ‘shouting from the outside’.
The Beyond ESAP document marked the change of strategy. It shifted the focus of the ‘development’ problem from politics to economics, identifying the problem not as political, requiring worker control, but technical, requiring better policy interventions. The document had a ‘modernist’ thrust to it, employing non-Marxist structuralist language which sought to emphasise the ‘structural rigidities’ of the Zimbabwean economy. It identified a ‘formal’ sector that was ‘enclave’ in nature and extroverted; and a ‘non-formal’ sector which provided labour and food commodities to the formal. Moreover, it called for the ‘endogenisation’ of growth by the integration of the two through land reform and state-led industrialisation. However, it placed among its principal objectives ‘the need to upgrade the performance of the economy so that it meets international standards of global competitiveness’ (ZCTU 1996, 10), thereby pinning its hopes on the invisible hand of the market after ‘take off’. As Patrick Bond (1999, 4) observed, ‘the ZCTU's own failure to express the popular anti-ESAP outrage reflected not the “failure of the policy” but ESAP's success in reducing all analysis to modernisation theory and all policy discourse to encouraging capital accumulation.’ The ZCTU was now abandoning its radical political unionism and entering the phase of social democratic strategic unionism.
Indeed, the ZCTU was warming up to the global agencies. In April 1996, a seminar was jointly organised by the ZCTU and the IFIs, in the first move by the IFIs to consult with labour. The seminar was attended by trade unionists from the region, including Andrew Kailembo, the representative of the African Regional Organisation of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU-AFRO). Trade unionists welcomed the new interest on the part of the IFIs in the labour movement, and especially the Bank's interest in labour issues, as demonstrated by its 1995 World Development Report on ‘Workers in an integrating world’. Kailembo condemned the previous exclusion of labour from the design of SAPs, which he declared ‘economic sabotage’. Other trade unionists went much further to call for compensation from the IFIs. Despite the new engagement with labour, however, the IFIs remained unrepentant, claiming that responsibility for consultation with social partners rested with governments.
In May 1996, the debate was again evading the issue of external imposition. The ZCTU and the International Labour Organization (ILO), now together with the World Bank, were arguing against the IMF visiting representative for the need for government to ‘consult stakeholders’ on the second phase of ESAP. In a new twist, Tsvangirai was now appealing to the IMF to exercise influence over the government of Zimbabwe in the interest of the labour movement: ‘there is need for the IMF to use its influence to bring about meaningful consultations between government and all the social partners’ (TW 36: June 1996). In the event, the IMF team leader, Jürgen Reitmaier, did not oblige: ‘I have my reservations in playing a more active role in pushing the government’; ‘it calls for deep intrusion’ into Zimbabwe's “sovereignty”’ (TW 36: June 1996). He added, however, that he had read the Beyond ESAP document and had found it ‘impressive’.
This was the ZCTU's ‘strategic’ unionism: calling for ‘worker friendly’ economics without challenging political dispensations. While this had been a trend with respect to global issues, the strategic approach was also adopted in relation to issues of ‘worker control’ at the level of the workplace, manifest in the ZCTU's response to privatisation (to be discussed). Suffice it to note here that the strategic approach of the ZCTU on matters of workplace and external interference continued for the remainder of the decade.
The strategic call for dialogue with the ruling party did not last long. While there were contradictions all along – ongoing strikes, the enactment of EPZ legislation, the formation of the ZFTU – the reconciliation was to meet its fate in the latter part of 1997 over the ZEDLAC concept, as well as over government's decision to award war veterans unbudgeted compensation packages. With regards to ZEDLAC, agreement for its establishment was reached after the tripartite visit to South Africa. There was, however, a parallel initiative in progress at the time between government and the business sector, in the form of the Business Forum. In the event, the President's Office took the initiative to create an alternative to both ZEDLAC and the Business Forum, to be called the National Economic Consultative Forum (NECF), and created a national steering committee to this end. Controversy arose when the discussions within the committee pertaining to the structure and composition of the NECF were not taken into consideration by the President. Whereas the discussions had led to an understanding that labour, business, academia, other civic organisations and the state would nominate their own delegates to the forum, and that the body's decisions would be binding, it emerged eventually that the President had overruled this framework in favour of a forum consisting of members invited by the President himself. This violated the principle of civic representation upon which the original idea of dialogue had been premised. The ZCTU wrote to the President in September 1997 indicating that the labour movement would withdraw from the forum unless the principle of representation was respected. The ZCTU received no response and proceeded to boycott the first NECF meeting in January 1998 (ZCTU 1998).
Meanwhile, the country in 1997 continued to be rocked by industrial action, as living standards continued to erode. By 1996, the share of wages and salaries in the national income had declined to 40% from the 64% mark a decade earlier, while the share of profits accruing to owners of capital had increased to 60% from 37% over the same period, indicating beyond doubt that the share of the burden of ESAP has been borne by the working people (Kanyenze 1998). In 1997, as in the year before, strikes gripped several industries: now they spanned construction, commercial, hotel and catering, clothing, commercial farming, and cement and lime, as well as railways, urban councils, and post and telecommunications. In all, the year saw more than 230 strikes in 16 sectors. Most notably, farmworkers downed tools for the first time in protest over poor working conditions and wages that stood at less than one-sixth of the Poverty Datum Line (Z$359/Z$2400), demanding a 135% increase against the 20% offered by employers. In the clothing industry, developments reached dramatic proportions, with the dismissal in July of 13,000 striking workers, of whom 11,000 were later reinstated as casuals on short-term contracts. And in parastatals, mass retrenchments of up to 1200 loomed on the horizon, adding to the 2000 jobs already shed over the previous five years (TW 50: September 1997, TW 51: October 1997). These developments formed the backdrop to the ZCTU's decision to stand its ground on the urgent issue of national dialogue.
That which broke the camel's back, however, was President Mugabe's promise in August, a month after the national budget was presented to Parliament, to award war veterans a Z$50,000 compensation package plus a Z$2000 monthly pension, as well as the designation of 1471 white farms for compulsory acquisition. This promise sought to diffuse an emergent crisis between the ruling party and the lower echelons of its most crucial constituency, a crisis that had been precipitated by the looting of the state-sponsored War Victims Compensation Fund, but which reflected the emergence of a new and radical force in Zimbabwean politics (Sadomba 2011). In July 1997, during the African–African American Summit, war veterans demanded an audience with the President over these matters, and moved to disrupt the Summit. The state responded once again in a heavy-handed manner by banning strikes and reinvoking the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act which had previously and successfully been challenged by the ZCTU. Despite the ban, however, President Mugabe was indeed being held to ransom by the constituency that had been providing government with security for two decades. The President capitulated and announced a new compensation package for the veterans, amounting to about Z$4000 billion, without consulting Parliament. To meet the new fiscal outlay, it was announced that a 5% tax would be imposed. This was then presented to Parliament in November, despite objections by MPs. To make matters worse, it was announced that further burdens were to be placed upon workers. Besides the war veterans' levy, there was also to be an increase in the electricity levy by 5%, an increase in sales tax by 2.5% (from 15–17%), and increase in duty on fuel by 20 cents per litre. In the same month, government took the first step of designating 1471 farms for acquisition, signalling the re-radicalisation of nationalism on the land question. On 14 November, the Zimbabwe dollar crashed by 74% in a four-hour period of trading. National politics was reaching boiling point.
The new levy announcements, in particular, pitted the labour movement and war veterans in direct confrontation and struggle over the status of each constituency in national life. The events coincided with the launch of Keep on knocking (Raftopoulos and Phimister 1997), the ZCTU-sponsored book whose aim was precisely to recover the history and status of the labour movement. Tsvangirai seized the opportunity to challenge the nationalist narrative, noting that ‘[i]t is the workers who gave birth to the nationalist struggle, and not the other way around’ (TW 53: December 1997/January 1998). These words echoed those in the preface to the book: ‘[t]he history of a nation-in-the-making should not be reduced to a selective heroic tradition, but should be a tolerant and continuing process of questioning and re-examination’ (Tsvangirai 1997, xi). The struggle over national meanings was matched by the organisational struggle on the ground. Throughout September and October, the ZCTU held consultative meetings with workers in all regions, in the newly conceived Labour Forums, to decide what action should be taken. The failure of the 1996 call for a General Strike had driven home the point that full consultation with workers was a fundamental prerequisite for national action. Through the Labour Forums, a decision was finally reached to stage a country-wide strike and demonstration on 9 December, if the government refused to withdraw the announced levies.
The government did not acquiesce to the ZCTU's ultimatum – or the scrutiny of the IFIs, which now demanded to know where the funds would come from. Thus, on 9 December the labour movement proceeded to bring production to a halt in all six regions, in the first nationwide, ZCTU-organised industrial action in the post-independence era. Workers demonstrated in large numbers in all major centres, including Bulawayo, Masvingo, Mutare, Gweru and Marondera. Events transpired differently in Harare, however, and its adjacent town, Chitungwiza. An expected turnout of 250,000 persons in the capital was disrupted by riot police, who used tear gas, batons, and dogs against demonstrators converging on the centre. The demonstrators were prevented from entering Harare.
The magnitude of the strike and the resort by the state to coercion indicated that the tide had finally swung. The scale of the resistance dealt a blow to the ruling party. And the national mood had been transformed. As The Worker reported in its Special Issue (December 1997) on the strike:
… the political landscape of this country will never be the same after December 9, 1997. Rampant corruption and unemployment, collapse of health services, an ailing economy and an unaccountable government are sure recipes for disaster. The people have risen to blaze the way to salvation and it may just be a matter of time.
The national mood had indeed changed, and the ruling party had to face the reality, of organised workers and war veterans challenging the state on different grounds. The government finally moved to withdraw the war veterans levy, which was due to come into effect in January 1998, but in spite of the national budget, the government did award the war veterans the promised compensation.
The government also moved to scrap the electricity and fuel hikes, but the sales tax was retained. The ZCTU in its turn, enjoying a further boost of confidence, raised the stakes. The labour centre demanded the removal not only of the remaining sales tax, but also of Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri and Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa. The tenuous dialogue that had been ushered in by the Beyond ESAP project two years earlier had finally been laid to rest.
Changing notions of worker participation
Before proceeding onto the period of renewed confrontation, it is important to assess the parallel transformation of the ZCTU's notion of worker participation at the workplace under the global ‘reality’ of privatisation. Recall that while the first phase of ESAP was to focus on stabilisation, trade liberalisation, and public enterprise reform, the latter project did not get far off the ground. The agricultural marketing boards were commercialised, but this was the only noteworthy change. Thus, the second phase, ZIMPREST, was to focus on the privatisation of public enterprises. To this was added the project of land reform, all within the evolving framework of ‘indigenisation’.
On the eve of ZIMPREST, the labour movement addressed the poor performance record of the parastatals, the corruption within them, the drain on the public purse, and the need for change. ‘If these companies are left operating based on the present system’, Tsvangirai argued, ‘the country's economy will eventually be in shambles’ (TW 39: September 1996). But the ZCTU's response was drastically different to that contained in its critique of the liberal investment code (ZCTU 1989) and in its workers' participation manual (ZCTU 1993), when it had called for public ownership of the economy and an accountable civil service. The ZCTU now understood privatisation as inevitable, and one that it must influence towards workers' ends. As Rudolf Traub-Merz of the Friederich-Ebert Stiftung (FES) put it, ‘trade unions must decide whether they should be onlookers or get involved with their own concepts in the whole exercise of privatisation’ (TW 40: October 1996). In this spirit, Tsvangirai indicated that:
… there is need to negotiate for better packages for those workers who will be affected during the process … It is also important to embark on retraining and redeployment of the victims. Privatisation should be accepted as a labour consumption aspect for an economic need. (TW 39: September 1996)
The commissioned study of 1997 pointed out that the main problems of the privatisation exercise have been the absence of a comprehensive policy approach, a legal framework, and an independent authority to oversee it. The study advised the ZCTU to put pressure on the government to establish all of the above and, furthermore, to participate in the privatisation exercise so that employee welfare would be safeguarded. Besides ensuring that the LRA provisions are observed throughout the process, the study indicated that the ZCTU had a role in ensuring that employees benefit from privatisation via ‘employee share ownership’ schemes and the establishment of a National Investment Trust for the warehousing of shares. Subsequently, the General Council of the ZCTU adopted the concept of employee share ownership, in relation to both private and public enterprises, and this was reaffirmed at the workshop in 1998. This, again, was drastic change of identity; earlier the ZCTU had rejected ‘employee share ownership’ as a system of ‘petty shareholding’ that was ‘designed to confuse the class identity of the workers and neutralise the class struggle’ (ZCTU 1993, ix).
The Zimbabwean case study produced by the ZCTU conducted in-depth assessments of privatisation and commercialisation with reference to a number of enterprises. The study re-affirmed the concerns raised above. At the close of the decade, there remained no clear privatisation strategy, there was no consistency in the exercise, workers were being largely ignored, the process was not transparent, and political interference was rife. A privatisation authority was finally established in February 2000, as the Privatisation Authority of Zimbabwe (PAZ), but even this did not meet the independence criterion, for it was placed in the Office of the President.
Privatisation was presented as a fait accompli. Workers were marginalised and generally had to engage with the process to cut their losses. Unions protested the ad hoc methods of the government, their exclusion of workers from decision-making, and the absence of transparency. Meanwhile, heavy retrenchments had already been experienced; for example, 1000 workers lost their jobs in the Cold Storage Company, 2500 in the Cotton Company of Zimbabwe, and 1300 in the Grain Marketing Board. In such cases, workers typically engaged with the restructuring process to negotiate the conditions of retrenchment. The issue of employee share ownership had been less visible, affecting the restructuring cases that had moved beyond commercialisation to privatisation.
While there have been ‘success’ stories in privatisation, one being Dairibord and another the Cotton Company of Zimbabwe (COTTCO), the employee share ownership experience was negative. For example, COTTCO was first commercialised and then incorporated in 1994, and was finally listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange in December 1997. Government took over the debt of the Cotton Marketing Board (CMB), and thereafter COTTCO restructured operations and succeeded in turning around the failing financial performance of the CMB. Yet, not only were retrenchments large (2500), the workers that remained did not benefit meaningfully from employee share ownership. Only 5% of total shares were allocated to employees, and 20% to small-scale cotton growers. Importantly, both small-scale growers and employees subsequently offloaded their shares onto the market in order to meet current expenditures in times of economic hardship. The ZCTU study noted that small-scale growers were the worst off, given spiralling input prices.
Resolving for state power, 1998–2000
The labour movement entered 1998 with heightened confidence vis-à-vis both the state and capital, and with indignation towards the tactics of the state against its leadership. The new year thus began with fighting talk. Provocations were issued to the state, with such articles in The Worker as ‘Will Tsvangirai run for President?’ Similarly, taunts and signals were sent to unconvinced employers. ‘We cannot rule out that the situation will be explosive,’ warned the Chief Economist, as early as six months prior to collective bargaining. ‘It will be really a tough time for industry. The only way out is for employers to negotiate in good faith and they must make a commitment to pay their workers reasonably.’ The President of the PSA was more apocalyptic: ‘one cannot rule out the possibility of industrial anarchy.’ The headlines of The Worker further drove the point home: ‘Workers want 50% salary rise or else …’ Meanwhile, the ICFTU was exerting pressure of its own, calling on President Mugabe to investigate ‘the brutal attack’ on Morgan Tsvangirai (TW 55: February 1998).
The situation deteriorated much earlier than expected. The new year brought with it price hikes in basic commodities of 17% to 42%, including a rise of 21% in the price of maize-meal. This brought the country to a new convulsion. By mid January, violent protests erupted in Harare and Chitungwiza, and these quickly spread to other city centres. Businesses closed down and shops were ransacked, while the government deployed the army and helicopters. The toll was unprecedented. Eight persons were killed and 3000 arrested (TW 55: February 1998).
In the face of public outrage, government moved to reverse the increase in the price of maize-meal. However, it remained intransigent on the sales tax and also on the outstanding 5% development (formerly drought) levy and the 15% tax on pensions that was due to come into effect in January 1998. Following the food riots, the General Council of the ZCTU met and resolved that the sales tax must be removed, and further added to the list the 5% development levy and the 15% pension tax. After the meeting, ZCTU President Gibson Sibanda called on the government to enter into dialogue towards a social contract, with the intention of clearly defining the sacrifices of each social partner rather than placing the burden of adjustment wholly on the shoulders of workers (TW 56: March 1998). Nevertheless, the labour leadership moved also to consult the movement once again, as it had prior to the December strike, on the merits of pursuing renewed mass action. Upon wide consultation and agreement, a new ultimatum was issued to government to withdraw the levies or face a job stay-away in the first week of March. As a new tactic, the stay-away aimed to bring production to a halt, while also avoiding a violent encounter with security forces.
Government and labour soon entered into talks but these again collapsed, and the labour movement proceeded to issue a nationwide call for a stay-away. This was indeed heeded by a broad spectrum of the workforce, public and private, and in fact surpassed the December strike. The March stay-away was the largest industrial action since 1948, succeeding in closing down 80% of industry, business, and public offices, particularly in the larger centres, but also in medium-sized and some smaller towns. The majority of workers who had been informed about the action and its issues in advance joined the action: more than half a million workers from all sectors. The stay-away was less successful in the rural districts and smaller towns, due to inadequate information and mobilisation, serving in this instance as a reminder of the continuing weakness of the labour movement in the countryside. Nonetheless, the urban success of the action demonstrated that lessons had been learned, mainly the principle of consultation. Besides reliance on Labour Forums, the success of the stay-away was also attributed to its non-violent format and, further, to its appeal to non-unionised sections of society. In all, the success of the event confirmed more than ever that the ZCTU enjoyed the support of a broad section of society (see Staying away 1998).
Despite the organisational success, however, the government did not relent. Thus, in April, the ZCTU began once again consulting with workers nationwide on the next course of action. The possibility of a second stay-away was aired, but now calls were also heard for the ZCTU to form a political party to challenge ZANU(PF) directly at the polls. It was, of course, not the first time that the latter thought had crossed the minds of workers, but in the wake of two major industrial actions against, such calls carried more weight than usual. Reservations, however, were quickly expressed by trade union leaders. The Second Deputy Secretary General, Nicholas Mudzengerere, said that it would be ‘very unfortunate’ if the ZCTU was derailed from its trade union agenda, while the General Secretary of the PTC Workers Union, Gift Chimanikire, warned of the dangers involved, invoking the recent Zambian and British examples of labour parties forsaking their working class constituencies. ‘Our main focus should be to deal with the politics of the stomach’, Chimanikire affirmed (TW 57: 1998). In the same month, ZIMPREST was launched, two years after its scheduled date.
The temperature for another stay-away mounted, as collective bargaining began. The persisting militancy on the part of workers was placing employers on the defensive, with some even suggesting that businesses close down to avoid the possibility of damage to property. Tsvangirai himself predicted (or warned) as much: ‘[t]he collective bargaining scenario will be characterised by very high tension because we're living in a hyper-inflation situation’ (TW 57: April 1998). In the event, workers in at least 16 industrial sectors were awarded increases of 34% on average, above the inflation rate of 29% but near the anticipated inflation at year's end.
Worker militancy also brought President Mugabe back to the negotiating table in early July, for the first time in three years. The labour leaders called on the government to stamp out corruption, withdraw the levies, and restructure the NECF in accordance with the originally agreed framework. At the same time, however, workers were warning the leadership not to back down on any demands (TW 60: July 1998). At the meeting, the government announced that the sales tax increase would be withdrawn at the beginning of 1999, but remained adamant about the levies. In the same month, the government went ahead and registered the new labour centre, the ZFTU.
Judging the response to be disappointing, the ZCTU, by the end of July, was again issuing an ultimatum and planning a stay-away for early September. This time, under mounting pressure and aware of the organising successes of the ZCTU, government relented. On 4 September, four days prior to the planned stay-away, a tripartite meeting was held at which government agreed to remove the sales tax, the development levy, and the pensions tax, and also agreed to restructure the NECF.
Although this marked a new victory for the ZCTU, it was once again to be overtaken by events. In August, the government, in joint action with Angola and Namibia, resolved to undertake a military campaign in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in the clearest sign yet of the re-radicalisation of the ruling party's nationalism, against foreign interference in the SADC region, especially by the United States. But having made a new fiscal outlay for the campaign, inflation spiked to 34% by September, an amount equal to the wage increases that had been won two months prior. In October, following a depreciation of the currency, fuel prices shot up by 67%, sending inflation to 45% in November and to 46% in December. The delay of ZIMPREST had also denied the government the requisite balance-of-payments support from the IMF and the donors, who followed suit. As of late 1998, Zimbabwe was being caught in a closing circle of military sanctions and financial isolation by the West. Yet, this was not opposed by the ZCTU, which was now making the transition to a Western-supported ‘regime change’ mentality.
In early November, new riots broke out in Bulawayo, Chitungwiza, Harare and Gweru over the fuel hike, amid public recognition of corruption at NOCZIM, the state-owned oil-procurement monopoly, and allegations of a link between the fuel hike and the DRC intervention. On 7 November, the ZCTU's General Council called for a 20% cost of living adjustment and the suspension of the fuel hike, and resolved to stage stay-aways every Wednesday and review the situation every two weeks. Two stay-aways were held, on November 11 and 18, in the course of which a Mutare resident was shot and killed by the Zimbabwe Republic Police during a riot. A third stay-away was finally suspended after government requested to reconvene an urgent tripartite meeting. This did not resolve the stand-off, however, for on 27 November, the State President issued a decree banning stay-aways for 180 days, under the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act.
After three successful nationwide industrial actions over the course of one year, the labour movement had discovered its strengths, but also its limitations. Besides being able to mobilise unionised workers, the ZCTU could claim to command the respect and support of a broader swathe of the nation that was not incorporated into its structures. The ZCTU certainly appeared to have become the leading oppositional force in Zimbabwe. But one limitation was that industrial action would make enormous demands on workers (who would sacrifice wages and face intimidation upon return to work) without effectively stemming the tide of job cuts and wage erosion. Another limitation, although less acknowledged, was the fact that, despite the groundswell of support that the centre received, it still lacked organisational grounding in the informal sector and the rural areas.
Indeed, at this time, the countryside was witnessing its first high-profile protest movement against government, outside ZCTU structures, in the form of mass land occupations. These were being organised by circuits of dissident local party cadres and war veterans, and timed to coincide with the International Donors' Conference on land. In the event, the latter limitation did not override the first. For in light of the ineffectiveness of industrial action, the ZCTU began to consider seriously the option that had overshadowed Zimbabwean politics throughout the decade, that is, the formation of a political party and the removal of ZANU(PF) by the ballot.
The objective of prying open the national debate had been pursued by the ZCTU via the NECF strategy, by which the centre sought to bypass Parliament, but also via electoral reform which sought the prying open of Parliament itself. The ZCTU was part of a broader movement, inclusive of human rights organisations, churches, academics, students and opposition parties, whose origins were to be found in the late 1980s mobilisation against the one-party state. The high-point of this movement in the 1990s was the boycotting by opposition parties of the 1995 elections in protest against the first-past-the-post system of representation, which was enabling the ruling party to monopolise Parliament and maintain a de facto one-party state. The broad social movement, however, remained loose and relatively ineffective until January 1998. At this juncture, it consolidated itself into the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) with a mandate to carry out civic education programmes and to campaign for wide-ranging constitutional reforms, with Western support. At the time of its inception, the NCA marked a formidable consolidation of diverse civic organisations into a formal alliance against the ruling party. It furthermore linked all of these to the organisational powers of the ZCTU.
Hereafter, the removal of ZANU(PF) entailed the double project of constitutional reform and formation of a political party. One turbulent year after the founding of the NCA, it was the view of the opposition that restoring the rule of law and removing the ruling party were urgent and parallel projects. Apart from the repeated use of the Law and Order (Maintenance) Act, the government in January 1999 once again overstepped constitutional boundaries by giving the military the green light to arrest and torture journalists of The Standard, a private newspaper, after they published a story alleging that there had been a foiled military coup against the government in protest over the DRC intervention (The Standard, 10 January 1999). The President sought to justify the actions by labelling the private press as ‘white’ and ‘foreign owned’, ‘bent on ruining national unity’ (The Herald, 9 February 1999; see also Raftopoulos 1999). The journalists were committing ‘treason’ against the state, and hence, in the words of the Permanent Secretary, were ‘subject to military law’ (Financial Gazette, 28 January 1999).
In late February, the task of forming a new political party to remove ZANU(PF) gained momentum. Over 40 civic organisations, including the ZCTU, convened a National Working People's Convention to discuss the formation of a political movement. The Convention arrived at a proposal to mandate the ZCTU to spearhead the MDC, but also established that the civic organisations must return to their constituencies to consult on the proposal, receive feedback, and then reconvene a final meeting on 5 May. It was also agreed at the Convention that the MDC would not be an exclusively workers' movement but that it would also serve the interests of professionals, civic organisations, business, peasants, the informal sector, and the unemployed (TW 68: April/May 1999). For its own part, the ZCTU held labour forums throughout the country, during which the proposal received wide support. The movement received resounding support among the other constituencies as well, and was finally launched in May. This however was still a ‘movement’, not a party. Forming the party was the next task. On 7 August, the ZCTU held an extraordinary congress at which 164 delegates from the affiliates met and voted unanimously in favour of the ZCTU's role in facilitating the transformation of the MDC into a political party.
The events of 1998/99 had transpired at such a quick pace that the reservations expressed only one year earlier by top trade unionists had been drowned out. Only scattered sceptics remained, warning against the dangers of subordinating the longer-term objectives of workers to a broad array of interests whose sole point of convergence was the finite objective of state power. An observer close to the labour movement voiced precisely such scepticism in June. ‘I am alarmed’, wrote Yash Tandon (1999), ‘at what seems to be an emerging consensus within the ranks of the general membership and the present leadership of the ZCTU’. While acknowledging that the ZCTU had an important role to play in politics, he urged for a politics of opposition. It is only in ‘oppositional mode’, he argued, that the labour movement could best pursue the interests of workers, pointing to the contrary experiences in Zambia and South Africa. Tandon further warned of the organisational weaknesses at the grass roots of trade unionism in Zimbabwe, the dangers of an untrained leadership taking over the labour movement and becoming subservient to their mentors in a post-ZANU(PF) government, and the ‘illusion that these “working class” ministers will be able to break with the present hold of the IMF and the World Bank over the economy when in power’.
The alarm was sounded, but the range of options available to the labour movement had narrowed. Nor was the mood in the street patient. Nor, for that matter, had the leadership articulated a class perspective founded on national sovereignty. Over the previous few years, the centre's contribution to the public debate had increasingly zeroed in on ‘economic mismanagement’ by ZANU(PF). ‘The ZCTU has not really changed’, claimed Tsvangirai at the millennium, in a telling interpretation of his own. ‘It has always been social democratic in practice. The Marxism–Leninism of the ’80s was rhetorical, within the political climate created by ZANU(PF)’ (interview, 13 January 2000).
The party was launched at Rufaro Stadium on 11 September, with 15,000 supporters in triumphant spirit. Gibson Sibanda proceeded to relate the MDC project as the successor to previous national struggles, as the ‘third chimurenga/umvukela’, invoking even biblical imageries (TW 72: September/October 1999):
Our struggle in Zimbabwe has always been a struggle for the dignity and sovereignty of the people. We, the workers and peasants have always been in the leadership of that struggle. In our first chimurenga/umvukela, workers fought against massive exploitation in the mines, farms and industry, and peasants against the expropriation of their land. The nationalist and liberation movement that led the second chimurenga/umvukela was born from and built on the struggles of workers and peasants. But after twenty years of Independence, we now have a ruling nationalist elite that has exploited this long history towards its own ends, betraying the people's struggles. Is this the country that we fought for and rejoiced in 1980? … For how long shall we wait for the biblical Moses?
Nonetheless, at the turn of the millennium the State House objective gained further momentum. The national situation deteriorated on account of severe foreign exchange shortages and a crippling fuel crisis, alongside frustration over constitutional reform, and all against the background of the ongoing DRC campaign. The resentment culminated in the stunning rejection of the government's own draft constitution at the February referendum, which the government had sought to win on a radical land acquisition clause, handing the ruling party its most crushing defeat in its 20 years at the helm.
This was a turning point for intra-ZANU(PF) politics, and national politics by extension. With parliamentary elections around the corner, the leadership was compelled to deepen a re-radicalisation that had been under way since 1997. Soon after the rejection of the draft constitution, war veterans and supporters embarked on a series of mass land occupations of white commercial farms. Leading members of government expressed their unequivocal support at this juncture, not least the President himself who went further to issue threats to ‘those who try to cause disunity among our people’: ‘death will befall them’ (Daily News, 17 March 2000). Such threats resonated among the leadership of the ex-combatants as well, who warned of a return to war and the installation of a military government in the event of a ZANU(PF) defeat at the polls (The Herald, 16 March 2000). High Court orders to evict squatters were ignored by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Police, on the grounds that squatting was now a ‘political’ issue. As the election period dragged on, land occupations proliferated, on as many as 900 farms. The occupations dovetailed with an electoral campaign, which saw violence rising to new levels.
It would be wrong to see the ruling party's radical turn on the land question as a mere electioneering issue, although it was prompted by its first ever defeat in the referendum. Deeper changes were under way in nationalist politics, from the rise of disaffected war veterans, to a US military assault on the DRC via proxy states, to multiplying sanctions against Zimbabwe (Moyo and Yeros 2013). Structural adjustment had proved an economic disaster for all to see: working people, in both town and country, as well as the aspiring black bourgeoisie, had all lost out. It also proved to be a serious strategic setback, which was threatening Zimbabwe's sovereignty, as well as the advances made in the region as a whole in the post-apartheid period. However, this setback was not recognised as such by the ZCTU, which now rowed against the current not of neoliberalism, but its antithesis, radical nationalism.
Conclusion
It is, indeed, a tragic irony that the ZCTU became a socio-political force to be reckoned with at the same time as it adopted a highly limited ‘regime change’ agenda, consistent with the strategy of the West's renewed campaign of destabilisation. This was a far cry from the ZCTU of the early 1990s, for which worker control of production and national sovereignty were the basic pillars of its coveted democratic project. It lies beyond the purposes of the present study to assess the fate of the labour centre in the 2000s; research on this more recent period is now beginning to emerge. By way of conclusion, and with a view to take the research agenda forward, two brief points will suffice.
First, it is necessary to acknowledge properly the organisational and ideological character of the ZCTU in the 1990s, as a first step towards identifying ‘what is to be done’ under the new conditions. There is still a tendency to dilute the deep qualitative changes that the labour centre underwent and the extent of its absorption and instrumentalisation by the ‘regime change’ agenda of the West. More recently, for example, Raftopoulos (2010, 708) has acknowledged that ‘[t]he discourse of human rights so effectively deployed by the civic movement since the 1990s has also had an ambiguous effect on the politics of democratic struggle in Zimbabwe.’ One the one hand, he continues, it has expanded the debate on democratic participation; on the other, it has diverted attention from political economy issues. But unless we fully understand what the transition from one to the other entails in terms of organisation, political programme, and alliances, such a call will amount to no more than a resurrection of the voluntarism evinced by the ZCTU in the early 1990s.
Second, in matters of political economy, it is necessary to face up to the social structure of Zimbabwe, and especially its new agrarian structure. No trade unionism will be worth its name, unless it takes this seriously. In this respect, it is not sufficient to decry ‘the rapid informalisation of labour’ (Raftopoulos 2010, 708), as if this is a new phenomenon; or lament the erosion of the ‘structural basis for labour and opposition mobilisation’, as if mobilisation is only possible in the formal sector. This is exactly the misconception propagated by the ZCTU in the 1990s, only to be outflanked by a new radical social force based in the countryside.
Note on contributor
Paris Yeros is Adjunct Professor of International Economics at the Federal University of ABC, São Paulo, Brazil. He is Research Associate of the African Institute of Agrarian Studies, Harare, Zimbabwe, and a member of the Editorial Board of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.