By Dr Takavafira Zhou
1 May 2019
(News of The South) – On a day workers of the world are celebrating the achievements in the improvement of salaries and working conditions, those in Zimbabwe are mourning their fall with monotonous regularity from grace to grace.
No amount of bellicose homiletics, grandstanding, pontification and maverick speeches from gvt officials can erase the fact that workers in Zimbabwe are getting starvation wages and have all tested positive to poverty, economic marginalisation, anguish, disarticulation and immiseration.
The new dispensation or Second Republic is a continuation of the First Republic and may even be worse. What changed in November 2017 was a leader, Mugabe, but his defective political system of sultanism (personal, dynastic one-man rule) and a defective economic system of statism, patronage, cronyism, lackeyism and clientelism, remained intact. The so called austerity measures for posterity have aggravated the plight of workers and totally decimated the national economy, while rocketing inflation has destroyed the value of workers’ savings, and the sky rocketing of prices of basic commodities has totally incapacitated workers.
The one armed banditry austerity measures have benefited a few elites who have continued to live large while the majority of Zimbabweans are wallowing in misery. Indeed going to work and let alone paying school fees for their own children is now a nightmare to teachers. The veritable paradise promised by President Mnangagwa has turned out to be poverty of leadership; dysfunctional state vehicle with flat tyres, flat battery, overheating engine and boiling coolant; dead economy, a diet of starvation and a bullet to the head.
It is within this context that workers of Zimbabwe must unite, get organised in order to fight thousand battles without losing one. The time for collective begging under Apex is over and now is the time for real collective bargaining under section 65 of the Constitution. Sectoral bargaining under the banner of Fozeu is a necessary respite for teachers. Yet teachers must realise that there is no easy walk to binding collective bargaining with a rogue employer. There is therefore every need to budget for resistance, vigilance and resilience. Teachers of Zimbabwe have nothing to lose but their chains. On this day, we should therefore remind the gvt that it remains an enemy of progress by underpaying workers in general and teachers in particular. Indeed teachers are a vital cog of societal and national development, yet they count for nothing in Zimbabwe.
Venceremos
Dr Takavafira M. Zhou (Ptuz President)
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