PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe and most of his top officials who graduated from their strong pro-poor, socialist ideology and now own several businesses and farms, could be the biggest beneficiaries of last week’s landmark Supreme Court judgement.
BY RICHARD CHIDZA
The Supreme Court ruled that the employer had the same right as workers to give a three months’ notice before terminating a contract, triggering massive job losses that could spell doom for the country’s working class.
Mugabe has in the past three decades turned himself from a school teacher turned guerrilla leader and colonial without even a salary, to one of the richest people on the continent.
His wife, Grace Mugabe, who as late as 1995 was a mere typist in Mugabe’s office has also joined the new capitalist bandwagon.
While it is almost impossible to quantify Mugabe’s wealth, the First Family owns schools and several farms with interests in horticulture and cattle ranching among others.
They own a multi-million dollar milk and milk products plant in the Mazowe Valley known as Gushungo Dairies after elbowing out Mazowe Citrus Estates during the land reform upheaval.
All this companies may need at some point to fire workers and Chidyausiku’s ruling would make it easy for the President to deal with labour matters.
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Mugabe is not alone in this; his two deputies Emmerson Mnangagwa and Phelekezela Mphoko have vast interests in industry and commerce and hence employ hundreds of workers.
Local Government minister Saviour Kasukuwere on the other hand has interests in the oil industry, among a host of other industries.
Judges also own farms and they have contentious labour matters to deal with.
Political analyst Ibbo Mandaza said the Supreme Court ruling was almost inevitable given the changing ideological and social dynamics in the country.
“It was unavoidable because the country’s strict labour laws were for a very long time, and until last week, protecting a very small enclave if one takes into account the employment figures. It is a fact that at least 90% of the country’s employable population is out of formal employment. That means the labour laws were only protecting a measly 10%,” Mandaza said.
He said there was need for a law that would make it possible to employ people on contract basis.
“You will understand that the Labour Act made it almost impossible to employ people on contract basis because if one were offered a job continuously for three months they were deemed to have been permanently engaged and any plan to lay them off would force the employer to go through the cumbersome and often expensive retrenchment route,” said Mandaza.
“The small enclave protected by these laws had for years shut out school-leavers and the majority of the unemployed population who otherwise might have been given jobs on contract basis”.
He said the situation as presented following the ruling reflected the “new capitalist society that Zimbabwe has turned into”.
“But Zanu PF is ideologically and organisationally vacuous. It is not a party but a movement, which means different things to different people. To Mugabe it means staying in power forever while to the likes of George Charamba [Mugabe’s spokesperson] it means benefitting from the largesse that has presented itself before him without so much as a shred of shame or moral blameworthiness,” said Mandaza.
In the early years of independence Zanu PF had a leadership code which in its preamble stated the party “constitutes a Socialist Party” and it was “necessary, desirable and expedient to impose on leaders a strict code of behaviour with a view to assuring the advent of socialism in Zimbabwe”.
Zanu PF’s code which exists to this day but is largely forgotten, imposes broad restrictions on the “leaders”, banning the ownership of a business “organised for profit”, although it specifically excluded “petty side-line activities” like owning chicken runs, small plots and gardens on one’s residential property.
All this is now a thing of the past.
Political analyst and law expert Alex Magaisa writing on his blog said the code is “strict and idealistic and perhaps naïve, although one could not fault the nobility of its intentions”, but indicated that the marriage of convenience between government and labour was short-lived.
He however said even following the adoption of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programne in the 90s, the Zanu PF government turned a blind eye to howls of disapproval from business then, the majority of whom were white.
“In short, labour legislation was regarded as anti-business. Nevertheless, government resisted change, choosing instead to pacify the increasingly disgruntled worker,” said Magaisa.
Magaisa said Zanu PF leaders then went on an acquisition spree, adding that some “got burnt along the way”, citing the example of the Willowgate Scandal that forced war hero Maurice Nyagumbo into committing suicide in apparent shame.
Former Vice-President Joice Mujuru is believed to be among the richest people in the country and beyond. Reports indicate she has interests in diamond mining, farming and many other facets of Zimbabwean life through an empire left behind by her late husband Solomon Mujuru.
“The bottom line is that the formal economy as we’ve known it in Zimbabwe is dead. Fact is a dead patient should be buried and not treated! Anyhow, those jumping up and down over Supreme Court ruling should consider that formal labour force is now below 5 000 from 2 million 15 years ago,” Higher Education minister, Jonathan Moyo said on his Twitter page.
“The majority of workers now are in SMEs which are not regulated by the Labour Act and in which the essence of the Supreme Court ruling is prevalent”.
Zanu PF has described the informal sector as the “new economy”, urging government to concentrate efforts towards taxing this area to support the fiscus.
Thus Mugabe has replaced the white farmers and white business owners after haunting the remnants of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia following the emergence of a labour backed opposition party that the white community supported in a bid to get rid of Mugabe and his “scorched earth policies” that had clearly not resonated with the new global economic shifts.
