Job Incapacitations and Strikes: The Personal vs the Collective

By Takura Zhangazha*

There are a number of strikes or ‘job actions’ that are being undertaken in Zimbabwe.  The most significant of these has been an over a month long junior doctors strike at a majority of our state owned referral hospitals.  This has also played out very badly in the public discourse with government issuing veiled threats against the striking medical doctors.  While also taking them to the labour court which has since reserved its judgement.

Teachers unions, civil service associations and nurses associations are also in one way or the other undertaking varying forms of strike action.  In some statements the worker’s representatives have issued statements advising their employer (government) of their ‘incapacitation’.  By this they mean they are unable to regularly attend to their work stations for lack of either access to transport and other amenities that have been negatively affected by the high costs of goods and services in the country.

The statements relate directly to the individual union/association member’s immediate material needs.  And its entirely understandable.  The main demand is that salaries be annotated either in the United States dollar (USD) or its free market (also the parallel market) equivalent.  This demand is shared across the board by all unions and associations. 

Other demands include improved working conditions for both the employees and in part also members of the public that require their services.  But there is no doubt that the immediacy of their own personal remuneration is paramount.  Be it the medical doctors, civil service associations and teachers unions.

And salaries have basically come to be designed as highly personal commodities in our neo-liberal economic framework.  Both as designed by the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) or as is now being re-emphasised by the austerity measures under Mnangagwa’s government.

So the issue of remuneration is highly personal.  Even in the unions and associations that are representing the workers, this contradiction can be both glaring as it is inspiring for current strike actions. 

The contradiction therefore becomes the ability of the unions/ associations to combine the motivated member to understand the bigger economic picture beyond their actual salaries.  And not on behalf of the employer.  But on behalf of their own collective. 

This is evidently much harder to undertake because it is either not populist enough or it appears rather complicated to the member of the association or union.  The populism required appears to be in two parts.  Either having a charismatic figure or a seemingly catastrophic event affecting the association or union in order to whip up immediate emotions and actions.  Even if they eventually become ephemeral. 

Moreover it is also important to take into account the actual after effects of strike actions and the perception of the same with the general public.  Particularly with regards how the actions may consolidate a perception and culture of individualism within the public to the extent that they lose sight of the importance of public services. And seek instead an unsustainable solution in private services either in education, health or transport.  And may in turn not value specific professions for their public service importance and therefore inviolability of their work and work ethic. 

 In these trying economic times, it is predictable that a neo-liberal economic framework is destined to produce regular actions of resistance from workers.  Even if they had not even been conscientised and are acting on angry responses to being treated unfairly. 

It would be therefore be fair to argue that unions and civil services associations are between a rock and a hard place. They have to carefully navigate the immediate and highly individual demands of higher remuneration from their members without losing the collective value or ethos of the union.  Or without making theirs a single issue and inevitably cyclical agenda.  

To put it more straightforwardly, the unions and their leadership now need to go a gear up and provide alternative holistic frameworks to the way in which their professions/associations function nationally.  And not just in the immediate but with perspectives that relate to posterity.  For example where it concerns the health services sector, is the commercialization template that is being touted by government the panacea? Or do we clearly need a system similar to a publicly funded and supported national health service that makes public hospitals not only viable but give everyone a chance of professional treatment?

Or if we are in the teaching profession, what are the key elements around public education that would make affordable education a reality for many poor children? And how would value, even beyond the material, be retained by the teaching profession.  After all, those that are causing problems in the education sector both for teachers and affiliated workers, all must have gone through a better education system than at present.

Or if we are in any other profession, raising key questions about how we do not anticipate any provision of mass urban public transport (ZUPCOs) should not be designed as a political stop gap measure but a public good and service. 

These are questions and issues that do not preclude the right of workers to strike or to increasingly choose either the private sector or the Diaspora.  Instead they bring to the fore the importance of teachers unions, civil service associations expanding the public and people centered values of their sectors to ordinary Zimbabweans.  Even if it appears mundane and difficult. 

It also helps even in the internal processes of unions and associations where members engage with not only the important issues of salaries/remuneration but also key ideological questions of the country and the necessary frameworks to build a better society for all. This would help tamper populist approaches and also encourage members to read between the ideological and elitist lines of their current predicament.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

Zim’s Emerging Lifestyle Crisis

By Takura Zhangazha*

A Diaspora based friend who works in the hotel and catering industry recently and happily told me that he had completed payment for an urban residential stand at a growth point. I asked him why buy an urban property that is so close to his rural home?   His answer was in two parts.  First that it was what his peers were doing. They were part of a housing cooperative that allowed what he considered relatively easy payment terms. The second reason which was a bit more nuanced was that he basically didn’t want to die without owing an urban property. 

Or even without escaping what he evidently considered the backwater that is his rural customary law governed and ultimately state owned land. Basically he had purchased a retirement home that wouldn’t have him go back to what historically we have come to call the ‘reserves’ or in local vernacular ‘ruzevha’.

And its all fair enough.  The city in our own Zimbabwean and African contexts was always going to be etched in popular imagination as being the best place to live.  Not only because of the ‘bright lights’ but more because of having been presented by the colonial state as the place where all the 'civilized' people live.  Or at least ought to. That we were to the greater extent coerced to begin to live in cities may miss our more recent historical and collective memory.

What is however more apparent is that the city or cities are increasingly more attractive to young Zimbabweans.  And the same cities portend assumptions of better living, lives or lifestyles.  With the latter meaning not only quicker access to goods and services such as electricity, water, transport, health but more significantly in search of recognition of success by lifestyle. 

And it is this latter point that is now defining our rapid urbanization in Zimbabwe.  What we are seeing is not just a physical urbanization of the country but more tellingly, an urbanization of our minds/national consciousness.  Regardless of where we are actually living. 

So a majority of us no longer desire what would be basic necessities even of urban existence.  We would want the recognition of the designer clothes (even if they coming out of imported bales of second hand clothing), the odd car, smart phone, shoe etc.  In this we have become enamoured to commodities that we think or are told should make us feel better.  Or we are suffering from what Marx and others would refer to as commodity fetishism. Except that this is particularly with the mindset of pursuing the best possible and fashionable urban lifestyle.

In this, we are not short of comparative analysis of how ‘others’ are consuming or failing to do so.  With the first departure point of this analysis being the fact of movement from rural to urban.  And then in the urban to compare, again, how much more we are consuming i.e. how many stands, cars, etc do you have? 

Or even more sinister, very base and materialistic comparisons of where your children go to school and whether you are still stuck in the ghetto or have crossed the lifestyle Rubicon that would for example be Samora Machel Avenue in Harare.    

This is why in part, with the severe reduction of the more formal economy, the scramble for recognition is no longer in specific professions or ethical considerations about income or a lack thereof.  The key issue becomes how much money you get not why you get it.  This would also explain why for example the denigration of the teaching profession comes with the greatest of ironies from those that went through the education system only to now spite it. 

Or in the medical profession, once highly valued and respected occupations such as nursing or even medical doctors themselves find themselves struggling for not only a past respect of their important work but with greater urgency, better remuneration.   This against the evidently opulent lifestyles of other previously less well paying occupations such as politics, religious ministry or being a foreign currency exchange dealer.   

This for many an admirer of capitalism and cut-throat free market economics, would not be a problem.  The only dilemma however for those of us on the left is that it demeans democracy and a people centered state.  The hedonism we are now exhibiting, as motivated primarily by highly materialistic lifestyle desires does not bode well for posterity. 

To be drowning in our own consumption, based on lifestyles that ultimately become unrealistic and at the comparative expense of those we would call others is an exercise in national futility. 

We probably need to re-balance the urban and the rural beyond the designs of the colonial and post colonial state. But probably more importantly we  just need to manage our materialism and greed.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

Zimbabwean Christian Churches’ Ridiculousness In Need of a Political Sabbath.

By Takura Zhangazha*

Like any other non-state organization, the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD)  is entitled to its own opinion on the state of affairs in the country. Except that its opinion is generally expected to be considered.  Its most recent one is borderline ridiculous and evidence of a misplaced messianic streak of undemocratic political overreach. Or even an assumption that with the limited levels of a critical national consciousness, Zimbabweans will probably forget the democratic principle of the separation of the Church from the State.  Or to quote Jesus, giving unto Caesar, what belongs to Caesar.  

To quote from the statement, the ZHOCD proposes what it refers to as a Sabbath that would be  ‘ national seven year Sabbath period for the purposes of establishing an emergency recovery mechanism to address the national situation’. 

This ‘national situation’ according to the ZHOCD would therefore require “the suspension of the constitutional provision of elections” that would, wait for it, be determined by a referendum. The lack of logic in the suggestion is laughable.  The ZHOCD wants the country to vote against voting.

The leaders of the ZHOCD probably prayed about issuing this statement.  Unfortunately the signal that they got from God or elsewhere is patently undemocratic that even St Augustine would be raising questions at their political theology. 

If the ZHOCD had ended there, it would have been a little less ridiculous.  In stating the problem and an anticipated result of the suspension of elections via a referendum, the clergypersons propose no actual mechanism as to who or what governs the country in the seven year electoral ‘Sabbath’. That will be determined by some sort of consultative process which assumedly, the church itself would lead.  Though it does not say so in the statement.

I am sure one of the main reasons why the ZHOCD has reasoned this way is because it knows itself to be an organization whose voice will reach the ears of the most politically and economically powerful in the land.  And because it has great societal reach, it also knows that is almost untouchable.  With millions of worshippers flocking to its affiliate churches every weekend, it can with relative ease influence public opinion in its favour.

But to influence public opinion in this way, by asking for and actively willing an unconstitutional suspension of elections, is an abrogation of the churches responsibility of ensuring peace, progress and stability in modern day nation states.  It is also probably as bad as shouting ‘fire’ in a cinema, causing a stampede, and claiming afterwards, that one was just expressing an opinion. 

There are therefore a number of reasons why progressive Zimbabweans must be able to talk back to the ZHOCD undemocratic statement.  Not only as a learning curve for that organization but a re-affirmation of a now long standing democratic value of the principle of the separation of religion from the state.  Together with the necessity of a stubborn insistence that democracy overrides religion. All the while guaranteeing freedom of worship. 

In another instance it would be useful to assist ZHOCD to recall that various religious doctrines have played important roles in our liberation struggles, they did not come to define these same said struggles. Indeed some may have been used to justify the necessity of liberatory armed struggles, others as a counter- narrative but religion remained firmly on the periphery of what in the final analysis were secular struggles.  Statements such as the one issued by the ZHOCD are a rather a vainglorious attempt to place Christianity at the centre of what should essentially be secular struggles.  Almost in messianic fashion.

Nowhere in their statement do they mention the political economic mess that has been wrought on by the ideology of neoliberalism.  Their vague generalisations about ‘healing’ without reference to structural causes of why we find ourselves where we are is not the stuff one would expect from the clergy. But then again, who wants to argue against the massive wealth that these churches preside over, their own internal dictatorships, their fraternization with the wealthy and powerful to curry favour and in this age of millennial capitalism, the devastating effect of their prosperity gospels. 

The ZHOCD  is however lucky.  The current Zimbabwean president uses religion as a political backstop.  Ever since taking over power from Mugabe and retaining it in the 2018 elections, Mnangagwa makes it a point to pop up at huge gatherings of religious worshippers.  And he makes many material promises to the leaders of these churches. 

Opposition political party leaders have also taken on the dogmatic approach to Christianity and politics. Weighing in on a fervent Pentecostalism, various politicans have put on both robes of not only being trained clergypersons but also politicians.  While it remains their democratic right to do so, the end effect is that actual church leaders at orgainsations such as the ZHOCD begin to think they and their religious inclinations are now the raison d’etre for the existence of the Zimbabwean state.

It is not Zimbabwe that must take nay sabbatical from democratic electoral processes.  It is the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations that needs a long political sabbatical.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)

Zimbabwe, Where Political Hope is Grounded in Pessimism

By Takura Zhangazha *

Back in 2008, a friend of mine visited the United States of America.  This was at the height of the Barack Obama presidential campaign.  When he came back he had all sort of campaign paraphernalia. Caps, t-shirts and the Che Guevara like poster silhouette  of Obama emblazoned with the word ‘ Hope’.  As far as he was concerned all of it was proof enough that he had been in the promised land of Obama hype and hope.  Or as was the given campaign slogan of that election campaign, if we still remember it, ‘ change you can believe in’. 

He remains ever enthusiastic about his experience and has also eventually fashioned his own political ambitions and campaigns around the same.

Another friend of mine visited South Africa in 2013.  He was beyond himself with awe at Julius Malema’s newly launched Economic Freedom fighters (EFF) party.  He did not return with as much paraphernalia as did my other comrade who had visited America.  He came back with only a t-shirt and beret.  But his enthusiasm was no the less diminished about how Malema and his outfit represented some sort of hope of how young African leaders can take over the reins of political leadership. 

In both instances I have cited, there were few questions about what the 'hope' portended by the same political players was. Any change was deemed to be good. Or in most cases the motivation for wanting it was a potpourri of anger, angst and a search of a political catharsis caused by  a collective emotion of political powerlessness against respective given elite establishments. 

In both examples, again, the political establishment persevered.  Obama never took the USA to the lofty liberal heights he had promised. His social media enabled populism floundered at the feet of a long duree (and Eisenhower defined) military industrial complex. And the shocking backlash that the same establishment managed to get Trump elected as Obama's successor. 

On the other side of the world, Malema not only failed to defeat the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa’s 2014 general elections  but also came third to the same country’s largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. And this was to be repeated, albeit with slightly changed results figures in the same country's 2019 elections. 

Political hope, however one wanted to consider it, was reigned in.  Even in  the most supposedly democratic societies. Either in the global north or the global south. 

Where we consider Zimbabwe, one issue sticks out like a sore thumb.  There is no longer any popular anticipation let alone understanding of political optimism.  Or as in the title of this write up, ‘hope’. 

Instead what obtains is a general expectation of the worst.  As informed not only by a lack of general public confidence in political leadership as it obtains but also an assumption that suffering is our national lot. 

Depending on your political affiliation or your geographical location, it is always the worst that is expected.  If you are a ruling Zanu Pf supporter, the message from your president (and also the country's president), is to grit your teeth, suffer, continue and hold your breath a little bit longer.  That is hardly a message of political ‘hope’ by any stretch of any patriotic imagination.

Or if you are in the largest parliamentary opposition party, the MDC Alliance, it should only get worse before it gets any better.  And only if they are in executive political power.  Unless it is them governing , expect the worst, is the not so hidden narrative. 

And this assumption of political pessimism is not only the prerogative of political parties.  It’s a thread that also runs through the most powerful section of civil society, the Christian churches and religion with their phenomenal influence on the national consciousness.  Whether it’s about the payment of tithes in the now more prevalent Zimbabwean currency as opposed to the United States dollar.  Through to an awkward desire by clergy persons to influence individual political leaders and collective political parties via prophecies, unless it is their way, it is therefore doomed for failure.  

Hence the main contenders for presidential political power in the 2018 harmonized elections all had a God theme to their electoral campaigns.  Though despite victory or defeat, the churches appear to be holding fast to still trying to prove the ‘authenticity’ of their previous and contemporary ‘political prophecies’.   All of which do not portend hope. But as all ‘prophecies’ do, they carry of message of doom if their dictates are not followed.  And still be able to get away with it, either way. 

In all of this, we cannot ignore the role of social media and an increased access to information that it brings.  But make no mistake, social media in and of itself is not a problem let alone a main cause why our national politics focuses on the negative as opposed to optimism.  It is ourselves as Zimbabweans who are caught up in an emotional complex that desires more the worst than the best of our own society.  No matter what side of the political divide we are on.  All of which appears to be caused directly by the trap we got ourselves into via a desire to live lives similar to those in the global north and east. Even if we do not fully understand how those societies got to where they are (colonial wealth included). 

We seem to be pursuing a recognition that is as irrelevant as it is materialistic. To be seen in pain and in search of a rescue from a world that in any event generally despises us for not being able to run our affairs as it would but also for wanting to share the success of its neo-liberal ‘normalcy.  We want the best of the world only if the latter sees and sympathises with our pain as inflicted by our ‘lack of normalcy’ by its own standards. 

And this then becomes our own Fanonian pitfall of our national consciousness.  We are no longer being true and critical to our own national contexts.  We want the easier solution as viewed by the approving gaze of social media and the political global north and its attendant all powerful global capital.  It is however more of an historical shame that this is what we are allowing our children to learn from us.

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)