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Build the rural motive forces to accelerate comprehensive
transformation
By Blade Nzimande, General Secretary
In October 2003 we again launched our now popular Red October campaign. On
this occasion the key objective was to highlight the plight of the most vulnerable
workers in our country - farmworkers, domestic workers and casual workers.
All workers are vulnerable under capitalism. But we characterised these strata
of the working class as among the most vunerable because of their marginal
location in the capitalist division of labour.
These strata of the working class are still basically 'rightless' and unorganised,
despite the very many progressive labour laws passed by our government. In
fact, in many of the farms in South Africa '1994' has passed them by. They
are still subjected to the very same old apartheid division of labour and working
conditions. The focus of the 2003 Red October campaign was informed by all
these realities. As we campaigned we became more aware of how many farmworkers,
in particular, continue to be subjected to barbaric treatment.
By the end of the campaign, involving scores of mass meetings, marches and
farmworkers' forums - it became clear to us that the issue is broader than
just organising farmworkers.. The challenge is centrally about broader rural
and agrarian transformation in favour of the workers and the poor. Our collective
experiences underlined the correctness of the observation we made at our 11th
Congress. The fundamental challenge for rural transformation in our country
is the building of progressive motive forces to lead such transformation. An
uncomfortable reality we have to face in the national democratic revolution
is that our struggles from the 1970s took on a strong urban bias. How is this
manifesting itself today?
Dominating the news and public discourse on rural transformation are rights
of traditional leaders and the safety and security of farm-owners. In this
discourse it is as if the primary challenge in South Africa's countryside is
to constitutionalise the rights of traditional leaders and to secure the safety
and accumulation interests of commercial agriculture. Yet the priority is to
address poverty and the social and economic condition of the mass of the rural
people, as a basis for safety, security and welfare for all in the countryside.
Despite huge inequalities and poverty in our rural areas, we have not succeeded
in really mobilising the rural masses around their aspirations in a struggle
for land and agrarian transformation. As a result, traditional leaders and
farmers have acted as the motive forces, and inevitably only for their own
class interests. Our government has embarked on very progressive reforms in
the countryside, including a sectoral determination for farmworkers prescribing
minimum conditions of service and remuneration, as well as a progressive land
reform programme. From our Red October campaign it is clear that progress on
this front critically hinges on mass organisation of farmworkers and other
strata of the rural population into a solid motive force for transformation.
The conditions of farmworkers illustrates this powerfully.
Their conditions are not only an expression of farm wage labour in contemporary
South Africa, but reflect the challenge of landlessness and the stubborn
persistence of labour tenancy in South Africa's countryside. Hundreds of
thousands of farmworkers still reside with their families on land owned by
commercial farmers.. So what we are dealing with is not just workers on farms,
but families on farms. The spatial and settlement patterns and delivery of
services on these farms are the most classic illustration of the continued
existence of colonialism of a special type in large parts of South Africa's
countryside. Whilst the farm-owner has all the basic services, clean drinking
water, electricity, etc, black families residing on the very same farms do
not have access to these services.. Whilst the farmowners' livestock has
vast grazing land, farmworkers' livestock has little grazing. And if that
livestock wanders onto the farm-owner's grazing land it is impounded and
workers have to pay for their release.
In our recent ANC election trail to an area called Luneburg,
some thirty kilometres outside of PaulPietersburg in KwaZulu Natal, we found
that farm-owners are
using these settlement patterns and their economic power to 'creatively' avoid
paying the government's minimum wage to their workers. For example, since the
introduction of minimum conditions of service by government, some farmers have
formally increased the wages to the government stipulated levels. By what they
do is to levy the farmworkers for very minimal basic services, for rental for
land, and they also deduct levies for impounding of livestock. After all these
deductions have been made workers' wages, the take-home pay is exactly the
same as before!
The majority of people in South Africa's countryside are,
however, still to be found in the former bantustan areas. It is in these
areas that the traditional
leaders call the shots and have privileged their own class interests over
the needs of the majority of the population. In most of these areas, land
allocation, taxes, and a multiplicity of levies are decided upon by individual
traditional leaders, in many cases subjecting rural people to the worst
forms of extortion. In these areas there is inadequate land for farming and
grazing.
It is to these conditions that millions of retrenched workersfrom the urban
areas return.
It is for all these reasons that we welcome the ANC Manifesto commitment to
'complete the land restitution programme and speed up land reform, with 30%
of agricultural land redistributed by 2014, combined with comprehensive assistance
to emergent farmers'.
However for this very important commitment to be realised it must simultaneously
be accompanied by a conscious effort to build sustained mass organisation as
part of building motive rural forces for transformation. The practical outcome
of such organisation and mass mobilisation could be strong trade unions for
farmworkers, producer co-operatives, broad based drought committees and progressive
land and agricultural committees. These could form the core of the motive forces
for rural transformation.
Our Central Committee has identified 'emergent farmers' as a key objective.
This is not just about constituting a new black capitalist farming class, but
it is principally about ensuring access to productive land for household based
subsistence farming. This would create a layer of small farmers whose immediate
objective is to provide food and alleviate rural poverty. This household based
farming would need to be assisted with agricultural inputs progressively aiming
to meet subsistence needs and towards producing a surplus. From such a surplus
one could build producer co-operatives to market and distribute such produce.
We do concede that in the process of land and agrarian transformation a layer
of a black capitalist farmers will emerge, but this should not be the starting
point of land and agrarian transformation. The starting point is to target
the landless poor and assist them towards subsistence farming as a strategy
towards poverty eradication. It is on these matters that the SACP will seek
to engage our Allies and all other role playersas a foundation for mobilising
progressive motive forces for rural transformation.
Programmatically this means intensifying organisation of farm workers into
trade unions and other forms of organisation. This means putting pressure on
commercial agriculture to open their farms to such organisation. As things
stand now, millions of farmworkers are not accessible to any form of organisation.
In addition, this means working together with progressive NGOs in the rural
areas. From our campaign it is clear that many of these NGOs are doing good
work, but they operate in an isolated manner and do not have capacity to drive
mass organisation in the countryside. This would also help to focus the work
of many of these NGOs towards supporting developmental initiatives, underpinned
and driven by mass organisation.
The SACP has also identified the need to put pressure on commercial agriculture
and traditional leaders, through mass mobilisation and engagement, as a priority
action point to begin to change the countryside to serve the interests of the
poor. Such a campaign should be a priority for the Alliance and the democratic
movement as a whole. It is in the deepest interests of our Alliance to lead
this effort also in order to seize the initiative away from organisations that
are hostile to our Alliance and the democratic government, both from the extreme
left and the right.
It is to these tasks that our February Central Committee has correctly directed
SACP structures.
WITH AN OVERWHELMING ANC ELECTIONS VICTORY TOGETHER WE WILL FIGHT RURAL POVERTY!
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The deepening crisis in Zimbabwe has produced a bizarre spectacle in
South Africa. The DA and other right-wing elements have seized upon the
crisis with glee to score political points at home. Tertius Delport,
the Citizen newspaper, yesterdays ideologues of apartheid, ex-Selous
Scouts and sundry friends of Rhodesia in their South Coast watering holes,
all the living dead have come stumbling out. Its long past zombie bed-time.
The sun has risen. Yet, here they are, on the radio phone-in programmes,
all over the letters pages of newspapers. Theyre even shaping the public
discourse.
Didnt we tell you so?, they trumpet. They shed crocodile tears for
the fate of ordinary black Zimbabweans, but beneath it all, make no
mistake, the message is the old one: You see what happens when THEY
take over. Zimbabwe isnt really Zimbabwe, it isnt even Rhodesia, it
has become an allegory for South Africa. ZANU PF equals ANC. President
Mugabe equals President Mbeki.
When he was in Zimbabwe, DA leader Tony Leon was asked by the MDC leadership
to tone it down. His vainglorious attempts to cast himself as South Africas
best friend of Zimbabwean trade unionists, rural poor, impoverished black
school teachers and nurses (the core of the MDC membership) wasnt in
the least helpful, they told him. After all, their opponents in Zimbabwe
are happy to play their own allegory games. Jonathan Moyo is very pleased
to equate Tsvangirai with Tony (Leon or Blair). But, while the UK
government has lately reined in its rhetoric on Zimbabwe somewhat, the
same cannot be said for our own intrepid leader of the opposition. Leon
told the MDC in Harare that Zimbabwe was too good an electoral opportunity
back in South Africa for him to lay off.
But have we in the ANC-led alliance not also contributed, in our way,
to this awakening of the living dead? Deluged by their nauseating sermons
on democracy and human rights, we have sometimes been too easily inclined
to simply close ranks with another liberation movement. We have sometimes
forgotten our own Freedom Charter traditions, in which human rights and
national liberation goals (like land) are not alternative choices, but
deeply intertwined.
We have also been inclined to forget what we learnt in exile. We have,
after all, come a long way in the company of the Zimbabwean liberation
movements. We were with ZAPU and ZANU in Dar es Salaam and Lusaka in
the early 1970s. We know about the fractious, sometimes bloody battles
within ZANU. We acknowledge the success that ZANLA guerrillas began to
score with their Chinese peasant-based strategies in the North-Eastern
Highlands, more successful than our own and those of ZAPU, our close
ally, at the time. We cannot forget the important gains made by the Zimbabwean
government in education and health-care after independence in 1980, nor
the huge sacrifices endured in fighting the Rhodesian and then apartheid-nurtured
destabilisation of Mozambique. Some of us owe our lives to the Zimbabwean
CIO and their detection of apartheid operatives on assassination missions
against ANC front-line targets. But we also remember the brutal Matabeleland
massacres between 1983 and 85 in which much of the ZAPU cadreship was
decimated, as the 5th Brigade cut a bloody swathe through Matabeleland,
leaving 20,000 people dead. In more recent times, post-1994, there have
been tensions over, for instance, the role of the Zimbabwean army in
the DRC. The simple equation of ZANU-PF and ANC does not do justice to
a complex history.
The allegorical reading of Zimbabwe also doesnt clarify the important
shifts within our ANC governments consistent engagement with the Zimbabwean
crisis. Everything (and of course nothing) is explained by invoking the
dull phrase quiet diplomacy. In late 1999 and through to the Zimbabwean
parliamentary elections of 2000, the ANC government analysed the emergence
of MDC as, essentially, a symptom of ZANU PF mistakes and stagnation.
The principal strategic response was to encourage more proficient governance
and renewal of ZANU-PFs party machinery, fostering organisational democracy
and mass work. For several reasons, ZANU-PF was unable to pursue this
engagement consistently which does not mean that we should quit trying.
The parliamentary elections of 2000 also underlined that the MDC was
not a passing phenomenon, it had established a significant electoral
base. There was a shift, therefore, in ANC-government thinking in the
run-up to the 2002 presidential elections. It was clear that those elections
would be close. What was less clear was whether a redoubtable Zimbabwean
security apparatus would allow an MDC victory. At least two generals
said no. For those who are far away, who imagine that regime change
is a magic wand, these kinds of realities might be easily dismissed.
But for anyone who is following current events in regime-changed Iraq,
or who appreciates that Joburg is closer to Harare than Cape Town let
alone London, taking off on a flight called regime-change when you
are not sure if there is an air-strip at the other end is another matter.
In the run-up to the 2002 election, our ANC governments perfectly reasonable
concern was to ensure, as best as possible and regardless of the victor,
that there would be a soft-landing. Hard work was done, before the elections,
to encourage the acceptance of some kind of patriotic government of national
unity once the elections were completed.
This proposal was rebuffed in the end. MDC felt it had been robbed at
the elections and (remembering the 1987 swallowing of ZAPU) was not prepared
to enter into a GNU at the behest of Mugabe. Mugabe felt that his legitimacy
was being impugned, and (much to the relief of half of the incumbent
ZANU-PF cabinet) argued that, until the MDCs constitutional court challenge
was dropped, he was not interested in GNU deals. This brought us to the
current impasse, and a third adjustment in our approach to the crisis.
It is now agreed in Pretoria and Harare that a new election is required
to restore stability and legitimacy to any government in Zimbabwe. Our
government has facilitated contacts between the two parties. Both ZANU
PF and MDC have committed themselves to formal negotiations in the coming
weeks that will discuss a constitution, transitional arrangements to
ensure free and fair elections, and a date for those elections.
The Central Committee of the SACP has expressed cautious optimism about
these important developments. We certainly agree that a negotiated transition
offers the most probable and certainly the most desirable path to breaking
the political impasse that is having such a devastating impact on the
social and economic situation in Zimbabwe.
However, the SACP is uncertain about the degree of commitment to serious
negotiations, particularly from the side of the ZANU PF government. We
are concerned that there is a lack of urgency. We are also deeply worried
by the continued repression of
workers, the rural poor, including many women, opposition activists and
of journalists. Such measures do not help to create a climate for serious
negotiations, in which both sides assume patriotic responsibility for
taking their country out of its crisis.
It is also important that we do not allow ourselves, as South Africans,
to be manoeuvred into a position in which it seems that we need, or at
least our government needs, the negotiations to succeed more than the
Zimbabweans themselves. The negotiations are, fundamentally, about Zimbabwe's
requirement. Successes should be Zimbabwean, and failures and delays
should be blamed principally on whoever is responsible on the other side
of the Limpopo.
The SACP agrees that the land question is very central
to consolidating the
Zimbabwean independence struggle. We agree that the continued monopolisation
of this key sector of the Zimbabwean economy as late as 2000 (20 years
after
independence) by some 4 500 white farmers acted as a massive brake on
transformation. However, a lawless, populist inspired land grab by an
elite
in the inner circles of government is a cruel caricature of the kind
of land
reform that the rural poor of Zimbabwe (and South Africa) so desperately
require. The "fast-track" land reform in Zimbabwe has left
hundreds of
thousands of the poorest of farm workers displaced and without work.
In the coming period, the SACP urges all progressive South Africans
to continue to engage counterparts in Zimbabwe, to express grave concern
at human rights
abuses, to support all genuine attempts to take forward the social and
economic struggle for full independence in Zimbabwe, and to foster conditions
for serious negotiations.
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