Given Mugabe’s record on land reform, it would not have been too difficult for the MDC to make the land question its own issue. Indeed, it was an issue that should have been even more readily exploitable by the MDC than by ZANU-PF: a bold MDC land reform programme would have undercut Mugabe’s fatuous claims to champion the rural poor and helped secure the new party a peasant majority in addition to its undoubted workingclass support. The irony was that, by default, the MDC effectively surrendered the land issue to the very party that had consistently blocked any real land reform for twenty years.
The MDC is correct to deny that the war vet land occupiers are a genuine peasant movement. But this is not good enough: · such an argument helps the MDC avoid the question of how a far more legitimate peasant social movement could be built in Zimbabwe and the question of what role the MDC and ZCTU could play in such an undertaking. In fact, a systematic programme for agrarian · transformation is precisely what the MDC lacks. For all its noises about taking the land issue seriously, the MDC has largely sidestepped the land issue.
This is unfortunate since the current situation seems highly· unstable and the need for particularly. firm leadership from the M.DC in opposition is self-evident. A strong police and army presence, ostensibly to prevent post-election violence but clearly targeted at harassing MDC strongholds, has helped create an ongoing climate of fear, .for example. Rifts have also appeared between government officials and the war vets who have now branched out into allocating residential stands in urban areas (charging $1,500 a piece for “survey” and “demarcation” costs). And many of the occupied farms remain under the control of the war vets.
It is in this context, of course, that the ZCTU strike (noted at the outset of this article) against the war vets’ actions and calling for a restoration of law and order occurred.· Not least important in all of this is the fact that many farmworkers will lose their jobs if the land is allocated to the farm occupiers. Philip Munyanyi of GUPWAZ estimates that farm occupations have driven 5,000 workers from their homes in the past six months, and that a further 10,000 jobs are in immediate jeopardy on hundreds of farms. Around the town of Bindura, for example, war vets have seized workers’ houses for themselves, whilst workers now live in makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting and straw. Up to 350,000 farmworkers could be affected if the occupations are legalized.
Regrettably, the MDC’s silence on the land issue, the failure to blend effectively the interests of workers and peasants into an effective strategic plan, is emblematic of larger flaws in its programme. Not only does the MDC lack the alternative land reform programme that would be deserving of peasant (and worker) support but the party also has yet to demonstrate that it has, more broadly, the kind of clear alternative to ZANU-PF’s neo-liberal policies that would be deserving of the long-term support of the urban working class.
What is actually required, then, is a programme for social transformation that overcomes divide-andrule politics by posing demands — around land, around political reform and social welfare restructuring, around popular self-management of services and production — that address the needs of both peasants and workers and thus helps building a class alliance between the two that transcends the urban/rural and commercial farm/communal area divides still mirrored in the June 2000 election results.
Any plans for progressive agrarian reform would have to accommodate both peasants and workers,of course. Specifically, it would have to factor in the vast rural working class,rather than presenting the land issue as simply being one of indigenous peasants versus foreign landlords. For one thing, GUPWAZ and its constituency cannot be treated as irrelevant to the land question; for another,the question must also be posed as to whether dividing large-scale commercial farms into tiny peasant holdings necessarily provides a sustainable basis for agrarian transformation.
At the moment the party’s dangerous liaison with business should be sending out warning signals about the need to secure working class control over what is,after all,widely seen to be · a “workers’ party” and to do so before the MDC is lost to its mass base. This latter is the danger with all centre-left political parties: they tend to look “upwards” towards multi-class alliances from which workers do not benefit and to demobilize grassroots struggles in a race to influence a state that is actually quite hostile to labour.
