adminIt is beginning to add up now, isn’t it? The illegal vendors laying siege on the streets, the land barons to whom hard-earned dollars are paid, and now the screaming workers.
Rangu Nyamurundira
And they said it was all a mere fuss, Zanu-PF’s charge of sanctions.
So, too, have we ignored for too long the greed and corruption within us that has exacerbated and prolonged the impact of sanctions, allowed one crisis after another.
But first, this phenomenon of pirates in our midst. These ones are not off the high seas, but on land. And we have plenty of these.
We have been desperate for housing so much that we are at the mercy of land bandits.
It comes as a great relief that Local Government, Public Works and National Housing Minister Saviour Kasukuwere has set his targets on land barons.
Has their mafia-like demand for homage not inflamed a desperate economy, so that home-seekers must embark upon illegal vending and commerce if only to avert the threat of homelessness?
It’s a comedy of tragedies that an urban electorate so long enticed to a fraudulent call for so-called change must have only cities of land pirates and illegal vendors.
But then, where, too, has local government and its Urban Development Corporation been?
How many of us even know of the existence of that essential statutory institution and its objectives, which could have stopped land bandits from robbing desperate people?
The Urban Development Corporation is given administrative authority over land that the Local Government Minister may declare a “development area”, and within which the corporation can assist local authorities to plan and co-ordinate urban growth and development.
“Development areas” must generate employment, encourage commerce and industry, and assist in provision of housing and social amenities.
Ultimately, they are areas that must spur urban development and a growing urban economy that can feed the national economy.
Has the Urban Development Corporation been suffering from the same poisoned sleep as Harare City?
It is a sleeping giant that must be awoken from slumber!
One can only imagine the impact had such a corporation effectively administered the US$57 million lost to land barons.
Would we not be seeing well-planned urban centres?
What is clear is that the fight for the heart and soul of Harare’s sunshine is on.
Cde Tyson must pull his best moves yet, nothing less than floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee.
Elsewhere, all over Zimbabwe an estimated 18 000 have lost their jobs within a month as the law allows termination of contracts on three months’ notice — and without benefits.
Land barons walk away with US$57 million, while hard-working men and women leave with nothing.
We wait to see if at all just one land baron appears before these courts of law, see what judgment comes.
Ours is an economy turned on its head. Stay alert Cde Tyson; the dismissals may well have more illegal vendors in the making, to re-converge upon a city that had begun to see order setting in.
The dismissed workers are now looking to President Robert Mugabe for remedy, even calling upon his long maligned Presidential Powers.
It is a tragedy of ironies that a Zanu-PF Government is desperately looked upon to remedy a crisis whose root cause is sanctions invited by an MDC that has long claimed to represent workers.
Cry, beloved workers.
There is, indeed, more to it than the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the law and judgment thereof.
The devastating effect of that judgment is only being defined by a sanctioned economy than by any ill-intent of the law’s interpretation.
Sanctions had always been designed to make the economy “scream”.
Are workers not screaming now, as calculated by the American Congress acting on MDC consultancy? Would the effect of the judgment not be different in an economy not laid to waste by sanctions? Would thriving companies so readily dismiss workers?
Workers are screaming today because they wake to the reality of sanctions invited by a so-called workers’ party. The Supreme Court judgment has lifted the veil that has covered struggling companies choked by a sanctioned economy.
It merely interpreted the law upon facts put to it, including by an Advocate Nelson Chamisa from the “workers’ party”.
The man celebrated his first big legal victory, forgetting his political constituency on the other side of that fight.
Chamisa gave applause to that judgment, this man who urged the very workers he and his party have betrayed to turn against a well-meaning Zanu-PF ideology advocating that workers be made owners of their economy through employee share-ownership schemes.
Chamisa’s applause may well be the last nail in the workers’ coffin his MDC’s sanctions created.
It is reported that Zanu-PF’s Politburo, Central Committee and National Consultative Assembly met last week, with the rampant dismissal of employees top of the agenda.
This is a natural reaction to a socio-economic crisis with far-reaching political consequences, isn’t it?
But we hope that as Zanu-PF deliberates and makes recommendations, most certainly to influence its Government, that it must first set clear guiding terms of reference to such discussions and engagement.
The terms of reference must be of the hard truth and reality of the cause of workers being made to “scream” so loudly in a sanctioned economy.
The plight of workers did not start with the now infamous judgment.
Workers were long the target of a planned siege of Zimbabwe’s economy by MDC and the Western economic interests that party represents.
Sadly, workers were made believe sanctions would affect only President Mugabe and Zanu-PF.
Now everyone turns to that same Zanu-PF Government to save them from their folly. The massive dismissals must be a hard lesson and wake-up call for a nation and people that had forgotten our shared fate and common destiny.
We have lacked a common and shared national interest to defend, each thinking him/herself more equal than the next countryman or woman.
Do the workers that look to President Mugabe and his Government for remedy now embrace the liberation party’s ideological objective to have workers become more than labourers, but shareholders in a new indigenous economy?
Or do they seek remedy only to return to being hewers of wood in a dying old economy?
Sanctions made sure that there was nothing left to scavenge and cushion us as we built a new economy for indigenous Zimbabweans, for workers.
Workers must bite hard on the pain as we endeavour to de-sanction our economy, during which companies and Government must be pruned, but only to sprout again and re-engage workers upon a growth trajectory.
Frankly, workers’ only real remedy is to engage an economic revolution whose time has come, advocate its acceleration of a new indigenous economy in which they will be shareholders with sustainable livelihoods.
Rangu Nyamurundira is a lawyer and advocate of Government’s indigenisation programme
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter