Creating jobs for the people should be a national priority

Obituaries
By Irvine MugwagwaTHE right to work is a fundamental human right. It is a right which is linked with the survival of people, firstly at the necessary material level of food, shelter and clothing and secondly at the level of social well being. Unemployment takes one  away from the comradeship and strength of workers linked together at the workplace.

But more than this, unemployment is also used by the employers to create a pool of reserve labour. The bigger this pool, then the more company owners can try to drive down wages of the employees. This have forced the employees to accept any wage given by the employer without any option of a negotiation. It is a take it or leave it type of a situation. The employees have to accept the wage tabled upon them because refusing the wage means a dismissal.

Zimbabwe is a country with the highest unemployment rate in the sub-Saharan Africa region. With close to 90 percent of people unable to find work, and each year thousands of youth finish school and flock into the labor market in which very few are absorbed in the formal and informal sectors. Thousands are left roaming the streets in search of the hard to come-by employment.

Being unemployed causes untold misery. In this country the right to work is not even guaranteed by the law. It is deeply rooted in the objective economic conditions of class society.

Human skills should become more developed so that the right to work becomes more and more linked to the right to choose an occupation or trade in accordance with one’s talent, abilities and training.

The previous regime once claimed that it was deeply concerned about the level of poverty and unemployment by saying if it grants land to the poor (it’s supports)then these levels will go down. The system that they used is rotten to the core. All is because of total maladministration by that regime.

Allocating land to unskilled people and in areas were there is totally no infrastructure was simply a cheap way of trying to campaign by Zanu PF. Now the people have realized that they have been used as campaigning  tools given land in areas were there are no roads, hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure needed in daily living.

It was a crafted plan that giving land to the people was a way of creating employment. Many people who were allocated those pieces of land are so poor that they are struggling to buy the simplest of the farming implements like hoes, ploughs and fertilizers.

Employment depends on the way in which production is organized in a society, under whose control and in whose interests. Unemployment continuously increases in a social structure where the means of production, the land, mines and factories are privately owned and used in the interest of a minority who live off workers labor.

This class consumes without production, concentrating more wealth in their hands and finally acting as a barrier to social development. The previous government has over the period they were ruling robbed the country of all its wealth and some of them are looting the diamonds of Chiadzwa and other precious minerals leaving many people suffering and unemployment rising.

Smashing the powers of greed politicians by expropriating their properties allows for planned use of resources in the interest of the majority.

Thousands of people entering the labor market each year struggle with previous regime’s mal- administration. For all the affected people, for the retrenched, future generations of university graduates, the only answer lies in the revolutionary transformation of society.

The social ownership of production, through smashing the political dictatorial rule is a vital necessity. To do so means that all people have to unite and vote Mugabe and Zanu PF out which have over the years messed up the economy of this country.

This country’s crisis can be ended through a whole people’s participation in kicking those who had been robbing the country’s wealth. Their places are maximum prisons for they had denied millions of people the right to benefit the country’s god given wealth.

About the AuthorMugwagwa is a freelance journalist based in Harare