The speaker probably meant the speech had all the force and the intelligence of the outbursts of the Conqueror of the British Empire and King of Scotland. I suspect that, as with that eminent personage’s oratory, the vehemence of our man’s speech obscured the reality. He wants to see black ownership of mines and businesses. We are supposed to all be satisfied with black faces in the boardroom and not concerned about the effect on the black faces on the factory floor or down the pit. On the other hand, he is not satisfied with seeing the faces of James Makamba, Strive Masiwa or Julius Makoni in the boardroom.
Neither was he pleased to see genuine hard-working black commercial farmers who farmed successfully on land they had not been given by him. We have even seen people, like Justice Hlatshwayo, who received their farms as gifts from him, losing those farms because someone who wasn’t prepared to work so hard at farming coveted their crops, cattle or equipment. But then, Zanu (PF)’s concern for the workers and peasants was never a good advertisement for their socialist ideals. The povho never rose above being useful canon fodder.
Does anyone remember that in 1980 Zanu (PF) acquired some farms and announced they were to be co-operatives for war veterans? If you remember that, do you remember how long it lasted? As I remember, it was after about six months that the party official charged with overseeing the farms told me that they were abandoning the co-operative experimnt, putting in managers and turning the workers into employees. “They were not disciplined,” he said.
That probably means they had a better idea of what a co-operative is than did the people in 88 Manica Road (Zanu HQ at that time). In a co-operative, all the members are workers and all the workers are members with a vote in the general meetings that decide policy. In socialist terms that is “workers’ control of the means of production”. But our chefs don’t want the workers to control anything.
Once they decided they didn’t want most of the ex-ZIPRA war vets in the ZNA, those chefs couldn’t stop them buying farms and businesses with their demobilisation pay and running them as co-operatives. But they could, and did, set up a Ministry of Co-operatives whose job seemed to be to harass co-operatives and hedge them around with so many rules that they stood little chance of succeeding as businesses.
The Permanent Secretary of that Ministry declared at the time “We see co-operatives as dustbins where we throw the unemployable”. If that’s your attitude, you show you don’t want them to succeed. Surprisingly, a few of those co-operatives were quite successful and did survive until the general collapse of the economy in the last three years. That’s not a bad performance for a bunch of unemployables’, but to some people higher up, it meant the povho were forgetting their place, which is at the bottom of the pile.
Post published in: Opinions