ZIMBABWE: Can the MDC solve the crisis?
The popular trade union-backed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) poses the greatest threat that President Robert Mugabe's corrupt and authoritarian Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) has faced since Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. Parliamentary elections are to take place on June 24-25.
The MDC emerged from the militant 1997-99 general strikes and mass actions by tens of thousands of urban workers', students and unemployed against the ZANU-PF's austerity policies, imposed since 1990 in line with the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and Western and domestic capitalist interests.
It has also drawn from the 1998-99 movement to democratise the constitution and check Mugabe's presidential powers. This movement was led by the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA), a coalition of more than 150 "civil society" organisations with the ZCTU and the Zimbabwe Council of Churches at its core.
Mugabe's persistent resort to repression and cooption convinced the leaders of these mass movements that a political alternative to ZANU-PF was urgently needed. In February last year, ZCTU leaders and progressive community organisation representatives met and declared the need for "a strong, democratic, popularly driven and organised movement of the people". On March 1, 1999, ZCTU secretary-general Morgan Tsvangirai announced that the federation's executive had approved the creation of a "political formation".
The MDC was launched on September 11 at a rally in Harare's Rufaro Stadium, attended by 20,000 supporters. The MDC's January 29 founding congress in Chitungwiza, a working-class township outside Harare, was attended by around 6000 delegates. The party claims a membership of 1.1 million in a country with 12.5 million people.
MDC leadership
Tsvangirai was elected MDC president, ZCTU president Gibson Sibanda became vice-president, and human rights activist Professor Welshman Ncube, an NCA spokesperson and a constitutional lawyer who teaches at the University of Zimbabwe, became secretary-general. About one-third of the MDC's 30-member national executive are active trade union leaders and activists.
Contrary to Mugabe's claim that the MDC is controlled by whites, all six top office-bearers are black. Only three executive members are white.
Tsvangirai is a former textile worker and nickel miner who rose through the ranks to become a union organiser in 1980 and take the reins of the ZCTU in 1988. Tsvangirai revitalised the ZCTU and transformed it from an obedient ZANU-PF lapdog (when it was led by Mugabe's brother, Albert).
Sibanda was also a mineworker who later became a train driver and union activist (he stills drives the Harare to Bulawayo service). During the liberation war he joined the Zimbabwe African People's Union, became its welfare secretary and was jailed by the white minority regime between 1976 and 1979. In 1984, he was elected president of the railway workers' union.
Student leader Learnmore Jongwe is information and publicity secretary and in charge of youth policy. Several other current and former student leaders are in the leadership and the MDC has been endorsed by the Zimbabwe National Students Union.
Pauline Gwanyanya, a leader of the Commercial Workers Union and chairperson of the ZCTU's Women's Advisory Council, is women's secretary. Other prominent women's movement activists include Sekai Holland, who was the Zimbabwean liberation movement's representative in Australia in the late-1960s and '70s, and Martha Ditima, both from the 60,000-member Association of Women's Clubs, and Emilia Chamunorwa from the Msasa Project for abused women.
A leading member of the International Socialists, Tendai Biti, is MDC land policy spokesperson. Biti is also a leader of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Lawyers Association.
Human rights lawyer David Coltart, whose 1997 report for the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace exposed the extent of the atrocities committed against the Ndebele minority in the early '80s, is MDC legal affairs spokesperson and its candidate for Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second largest city. Coltart's politics have been described as "classically liberal" by radical South African economist Patrick Bond.
Leaders of liberation war veterans' organisations and residents' associations from the bustling "high density" townships around Harare and Bulawayo are also on the executive. Zimbabwe's two main ethnic groups (Tsvangirai is from the majority Shona people; Gibanda is Ndebele) are well represented.
Broad coalition
In February, signalling the MDC leadership's intention to build a broad cross-class coalition against Mugabe, Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (ZCI) strategist Eddie Cross was named MDC economics policy secretary. Black businessperson Nigel Chinakara is also an advisor. The head of Zimbabwe's third largest company, Strive Masiyiwa, is widely believed to support the party.
The MDC has friendly links with white plantation owners. White farmers and rural capitalists have donated money, fuel and lent vehicles to the MDC, or agreed to transport farm workers to MDC rallies. White landowners and businesspeople are central to many MDC networks in the countryside. Collectively, the white-owned estates are Zimbabwe's largest employers.
"The business community is really responding", Marco Garizio, a white business owner who is also the MDC's national finance coordinator, told the New York Times on April 2. He reported that the MDC had raised about a third of its US$2.7 million target from them.
(Something that is ignored in Western media coverage is that Mugabe and ZANU-PF are supported by many white plantation owners and businesspeople — certainly by more than back the MDC. ZANU-PF does not have a problem with rich whites being involved in politics, only opposition politics. In recent weeks, the Commercial Farmers Union — which represents Zimbabwe's big, mainly white-owned, plantations — has abandoned the MDC and agreed to help curtail opposition rallies and activities on its members' farms in a bid to strike a self-serving deal with ZANU-PF.)
Policy contradictions
The MDC manifesto presented to its supporters on September 11 outlined a seemingly radical vision: "The political struggle in Zimbabwe, historically led by the working people, has always been for the dignity and sovereignty of the people. In the first [1895-97] Chimurenga [liberation struggle] workers fought against exploitation in the mines, farms and industry, and peasants against the expropriation of their land.
"The nationalist movement that led the second [1965-80] Chimurenga was born from and built on the struggles of the working people. The current ruling nationalist elite has hijacked this struggle for its own ends, betraying the people's hopes and aspirations.
"The Movement for Democratic Change is a focused continuation of the ages-old struggle of the working people. The MDC is a coming together, through a united front of the working people, to pursue common goals and principles that advance the interests of all people across Zimbabwe — workers, peasants, the unemployed, women, students, youths and the disabled people, among others.
"The MDC stands for social democratic, human centred, equitable development policies, pursued in an environment of political pluralism, participatory democracy and accountable governance."
The MDC has vowed to introduce a democratic constitution, with a bill of rights to end discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, disability and religion. It has given private assurances to gay and lesbian rights activists that discrimination based on sexual orientation will also be outlawed. Tsvangirai has promised to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the atrocities in Matabeleland in the early 1980s.
While an MDC victory will certainly boost the Zimbabwean working masses' formal democratic and human rights, it is very doubtful that their economic and social rights, or political power, will be fundamentally enhanced.
The MDC promises to provide free primary and secondary education, free health care and fund "massive housing schemes", while at the same time being committed to a "social market economy", reduced government spending and sticking closely to the requirements of the IMF, World Bank and Western powers.
As Tsvangirai told a press conference in January, the MDC believes that "the market has a role to play, but we don't believe in an unbridled market. We believe in a market that generates the wealth but a market which then creates and has social responsibility to its community ... given the state of poverty and degradation this country finds itself in." Nobody pressed the union leader on where such a "market" has ever existed.
On April 5, Eddie Cross unveiled a "100-day stabilisation plan" that commits an MDC government to "fast-track" the restructuring of all state-owned enterprises to be ready for privatisation within two years, reduce all "non-essential" government spending, and negotiate with the IMF, World Bank and other donors for debt to be restructured.
In the longer term, Cross said, the MDC will eliminate all price subsidies, reduce company taxes and income taxes for "middle income earners", introduce a goods and services tax by 2001, and outsouce a wide range of government activities. The MDC believes it can slash Zimbabwe's budget deficit from above 15% of GDP in 2000 to less than 3% by 2002!
Reassurance
A central goal of Tsvangirai's trips to South Africa, Britain and Washington this year has been to win support from Western "donors" and to reassure capitalist investors. "We have been given fresh assurances from the multilaterals [the IMF, World Bank and the European Union] during the past few weeks that they are prepared to release funds if we carry out what we set out to do", Cross said on April 5.
Of course, an MDC government will immediately find some extra funds to improve the lot of Zimbabweans to some degree if it ends the Mugabe regime's massively wasteful larceny, corruption and patronage, cuts the bloated salaries and personal resources squandered by the 52 government ministers, eliminates the duplication of services by merging departments, withdraws the 12,000 Zimbabwean soldiers deployed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which is costing more than US$1 million a day) and improves tax collection.
But the experience of Zimbabwe's post-1990 structural adjustment programs, the "fiscal discipline" of the far better resourced post-apartheid government in South Africa and the performance of every other Third World government under the tutelage of the IMF and World Bank, especially in Africa, shows that the MDC's promises of improving the people's material and social conditions are incompatible with its pledge to abide by the conditions imposed by Western "donors".
Cross subtly acknowledged the likely large gap between the promises and the real possibilities in a policy document dated April 5: "Economic policy-making and management involves making choices, some of which are difficult and unpopular. The MDC government will not shrink from making the tough decisions and sticking by them, but it will also seek to involve major economic actors in a continuous consultative process."
In its "Manifesto Summary" this is spelled out further: "The MDC will negotiate a social contract with stakeholders ... It will cover pricing policy, incomes, wages and employment, and fiscal policy."
Whereas Mugabe has forced austerity on the workers and poor at the behest of the imperialist powers, it seems that the MDC believes it can convince them to sit around the table and agree to it. In another document, Cross notes: "Of one thing the international community can be sure, only a government with broad-based popular support can deal with the fundamental restructuring of government that is required".
Land policy
The MDC faces a similar dilemma with its land reform policy. An MDC document on land reform released in March states: "The MDC is the only political party with a coherent land policy, one which will respect the rule of law and respect private property".
Tsvangirai said in South Africa in April: "No one argues about land reform. But it must be done in an orderly fashion. Mugabe is throwing that out the window for the sake of holding onto power ... We must create an all-stakeholders land commission to assess where the spare land is, distribute it, and make sure that those who need the land have access."
The MDC has pledged to abide by the agreement that Mugabe made with Western donors in 1998 in which funds were promised as long as wealthy farmers' land was acquired at market rates and in most circumstances on a "willing seller, willing buyer" basis. (For all Mugabe's posturing about "seizing" land, he is not proposing to go beyond this deal. The sticking point between Mugabe and Britain is that London refuses to release the promised funds for land acquisition until the land occupations end. Mugabe is not prepared to abandon his trump card over the MDC until after the elections.)
It is the combined effects of "willing buyer, willing seller" and market rates compensation (i.e., respect for the "rule of law" and private property) — measures that Western governments and financial institutions consider non-negotiable — that have stymied genuine land reform in Zimbabwe.
The MDC may be able to relieve the pressure for land reform for several years by redistributing the 3 million or so hectares of land that has already been acquired by the government but has not yet been distributed. Another 3-4 million can be acquired by repossessing the farms corruptly granted to ZANU-PF politicians and officials, and by acquiring derelict land, the land of absentee landowners and land from farmers with more than one farm (all permitted under the 1998 agreement as long as they are fully compensated). The MDC intends to impose a tax on unutilised land to encourage farmers to sell (and also reduce the price of land).
However, this cannot hope to address, on the scale or at the pace required, the land hunger of millions of peasants eking out a living in the overcrowded and arid communal farming areas, and the millions more with no land at all.
The MDC's willingness to cement an alliance with Â鶹´«Ã½ of Zimbabwe's capitalist class, convince the West it can be trusted and place its land policy in a straightjacket to win favours from rich farmers mean that it will be impossible for the party to fulfil the promises it is making to its working-class and poor supporters. When these contradictions become apparent, if the MDC wins a majority in June, big debates within the MDC and the workers' movement are likely.
The MDC was born amidst fierce struggles against austerity and for democracy. Should the MDC turn around and attempt to impose the same policies, albeit in a more civilised and consensual manner, there is bound to be a reaction.
Most socialists and leftists in Zimbabwe have opted to offer critical support to the MDC. Their assessment is that a victory for the MDC will create democratic space for the labour movement to better organise. They feel that a defeat for the Mugabe regime will enthuse and give confidence to working-class militants who believe the MDC's politics are further to the left than they really are. If they are correct, Zimbabwe's small socialist left may be well positioned to lead the fight against neo-liberal policies within the MDC.
MDC policy documents can be obtained from the party's web site at .
BY NORM DIXON