Zimbabwe Leads the World!

by Auckland union activist 2 May 2009 Zimbabwe is truly a world leader. Mugabe's government, which followed the IMF and World Bank's neo liberal plans for their economy to the letter, showed us all where these policies will get you. The austerity medicine prescribed for Zimbabwe by the World Bank, included oppressive and harsh debt repayment, funded by massive privatisation of virtually every public service and national asset. The mantra was "free enterprise knows best". Now the whole world is learning the harsh lesson that the people of Zimbabwe know only too well. As one commentator once said: "free enterprise means free foxes in a free chicken run". It seems that most government's, including president Obama's and our own, instead of getting their shotgun like any sensible farmer would do, is instead feeding the fox more chickens in the hope that this will make him satisfied. See What comes after a trillion? [23 April 2009] a NZ Sunday Star article on the failed Zimbabwe economy.

Destroying African Agriculture

A yound protestor in Jakarta, Indonesia, calling for the World Bank to be shutdown. All round the globe the World Bank and IMF have been responsible for destroying local food economies.

by Walden Bello

from Countercurrents

07 June, 2008

Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains.

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"The struggle of memory against forgetting"

This excellent address by filmmaker and journalist John Pilger reminds us all of an uncomfortable truth - that all the great breakthroughs in history, like the end of apartheid in South Africa, happened because ordinary people fought for it. Those people were called "criminals" and "terrorists" at the time, they were harrassed, jailed, beaten, even killed... and then, after they won, the rich and powerful tried to pretend that they were on the right side of history all the time. The media and the history books will always tell the stories of those in power, and lie to us that no other world is possible. Those of us fighting to change the world now have to remember this lesson, if we want them to be telling our stories in the future. Honouring the 'unbreakable promise' by John Pilger March 2008 Almost fourteen years after South Africa's first democratic elections and the fall of racial apartheid, John Pilger describes, in an address at Rhodes University, the dream and reality of the new South Africa and the responsibility of its new elite. On my wall in London is a photograph I have never grown tired of looking at. Indeed, I always find it thrilling to behold. You might even say it helps keep me going. It is a picture of a lone woman standing between two armoured vehicles, the notorious 'hippos', as they rolled into Soweto. Her arms are raised. Her fists are clenched. Her thin body is both beckoning and defiant of the enemy. It was May Day 1985 and the uprising against apartheid had begun. The fine chronicler of apartheid, Paul Weinberg, took that photograph. He described crouching in a ditch at the roadside as the hippos entered Soweto. People were being shot with rubber bullets and real bullets. "I looked around," he said, "and there in the ditch next to me was this bird-like woman, who suddenly pulled out a bottle of gin, took a swig, then went over the top and marched straight into the moving line of vehicles. It was one of the bravest things I've seen." Paul's photograph brings to mind one of my favourite quotations. "The struggle of people against power," wrote Milan Kundera, " is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Moments such as that woman's bravery ought to be unforgettable, for they symbolise all the great movements of resistance to oppression: in South Africa, the Freedom Charter, Nelson Mandela at the Rivonia Trial, the heroism of Steve Biko, the women who somehow kept their children alive on freezing hillsides in places like Dimbaza where they had been removed and declared redundant, and beyond, the Jews who rose against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Palestinians who just the other day smashed down the walls of their prison in Gaza. Unforgettable? For some, yes. But there are those who prefer we celebrate a system of organised forgetting: of unbridled freedom for the few and obedience for the many; of socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor. They prefer that the demonstrable power of ordinary people is committed to what George Orwell called the memory hole. You may ask how we can possibly forget when we live in an information age? The answer to that is another question: Who are "we"? Unlike you and me, most human beings have never used a computer and never owned a telephone. And those of us who are technologically blessed often confuse information with media, and corporate training with knowledge. These are probably the most powerful illusions of our times. We even have a new vocabulary, in which noble concepts have been corporatised and given deceptive, perverse, even opposite meanings. "Democracy" is now the free market - a concept itself berefet of freedom. "Reform" is now the denial of reform. "Economics" is the relegation of most human endeavour to material value, a bottom line. Alternative models that relate to the needs of the majority of humanity end up in the memory hole. And "governance" - so fashionable these days - means an economic system approved in Washington, Brussels and Davos. "Foreign policy" is service to the dominant power. Conquest is "humanitarian intervention". Invasion is "nation-building". Every day, we breathe the hot air of these pseudo ideas with their pseudo truths and pseudo experts. They set the limits of public debate within the most advanced societies. They determine who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. They manipulate our compassion and our anger and make many of us feel there is nothing we can do. Take the "war on terror". This is an entirely bogus idea that actually means a war of terror. Its aim is to convince people in the rich world that we all must live in an enduring state of fear: that Muslim fanatics are threatening our civilisation. In fact, the opposite is true. The threat to our societies comes not from Al Qaeda but from the terrorism of powerful states. Ask the people of Iraq, who in five years have seen the physical and social destruction of their country. President Bush calls this "nation-building". Ask the people of Afghanistan, who have been bombed back into the arms of the Taliban - this is known in the West as a "good war". Or the people of Gaza, who are denied water, food, medicines and hope by the forces of so-called civilisation. The list is long and the arithmetic simple. The greatest number of victims of this war of terror are not Westerners, but Muslims: from Iraq to Palestine, to the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria and beyond. We are constantly told that September 11th 2001 was a day that changed the world and - according to John McCain - justifies a 100-year war against America's perceived enemies. And yet, while the world mourned the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans, the UN routinely reported that the mortality rate of children dead from the effects of extreme poverty had not changed. The figure for September 11th 2001 was more than 36,000 children. That is the figure every day. It has not changed. It is not news. The difference between the two tragedies is that the people who died in the Twin Towers in New York were worthy victims, and the thousands of children who die every day are unworthy victims. That is how many of us are programmed to perceive the world. Or so the programmers hope. In the information age, these children are expendable. In South Africa, they are the children of the evicted and dispossessed, children carrying water home from a contaminated dam. They are not the children in the gated estates with names like Tuscany. They are not covered by the theories of GEAR or NEPAD or any of the other acronyms of power given respectability by journalism and scholarship. It seems to me vital that young people today equip themselves with an understanding of how this often subliminal propaganda works in modern societies - liberal societies: societies with proud constitutions and freedom of speech, like South Africa. For it says that freedom from poverty - the essence of true democracy - is a freedom too far. In South Africa, new graduates have, it seems to me, both a special obligation and an advantage. The advantage they have is that the past is still vividly present. Only last month, the National Institute for Occupational Health revealed that in the last six years deadly silicosis had almost doubled among South Africa's gold miners. There are huge profits in this industry. Many of the miners are abandoned and die in their 40s - their families too poor to afford a burial. Why is there still no proper prevention and compensation? And although Desmond Tutu pleaded with them, not one company boss in any of the apartheid-propping industries ever sought an amnesty from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They were that confident that for things to change on the surface, things would remain the same. For young graduates these days, there is a temptation to set themselves apart from the conditions I have described and from the world some have come from. As members of a new privileged elite, they have an obligation, I believe, to forge the vital link with the genius of everyday life and the resourcefulness and resilience of ordinary people. This will allow them, in whatever way you choose, to finish the job begun by Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko and the brave woman in the photograph. In a nutshell, it means standing by one's compatriots in order to bring true freedom to South Africa. Those who led the struggle against racial apartheid often said no. They dissented. They caused trouble. They took risks. They put people first. And they were the best that people can be. Above all, they had a social and political imagination that unaccountable power always fears. And they had courage. It is this imagination and courage that opens up real debate with real information and allows ordinary people to reclaim their confidence to demand their human and democratic rights. Oscar Wilde wrote: "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue". I read the other day that the South African police calculated that the number of protests across the country had doubled in just two years to more than 10,000 every year. That may be the highest rate of dissent in the world. That's something to be proud of - just as the Freedom Charter remains something to be proud of. Let me remind you how it begins: "We, the people of South Africa, declare that our country belongs to everyone...". And that, as Nelson Mandela once said, was the "unbreakable promise". Isn't it time the promise was kept? This is edited version of an address in March 2008 by John Pilger to graduating students at Rhodes University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in literature.

ZIMBABWE SOLIDARITY APPEAL

ZIMBABWE SOLIDARITY APPEAL Grant Morgan, Socialist Worker central committee member and RAM chair, has initiated an urgent appeal to help our comrades in Zimbabwe. The International Socialist Organisation (ISO) is at the cutting edge of a mass movement against the dictatorial rule of Robert Mugabe. The ISO were leading players in the recent People's Convention, whose 3,000+ delegates adopted a People's Charter, which is described as "drawing from the Workers Charter of... New Zealand". The People’s Charter is being taken out to workers, peasants and students across Zimbabwe to act as a rallying point against both Mugabe and the forces of neo-liberalism. In order to fund their important work, the poverty-stricken ISO has made an urgent international appeal for funds. Can you make a donation? Because of their very difficult situation in a dictatorial and chaotic land, the ISO say that the best way for them to receive funds is by a money gram. Grant Morgan will be organising a money gram to send to the poverty-stricken ISO. Mail cheques (made out to Grant Morgan) to 24 Church Rd, Mangere Bridge, Manukau City. Or transfer money directly into Grant's account, details are: Account name: G.C. Morgan Bank: ASB Bank Branch: Green Bay Account number: 12 3070 0123624 50 When the money is collected and sent Grant will email a statement out to all NZ donors. If you have any inquires contact Grant (09) 634 4432 (h+w), 021 2544 515 or grantmorgan@paradise.net.nz Please contribute towards this very worthwhile cause.

Destroying African Agriculture

by Walden Bello from Countercurrents 07 June, 2008 Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel feedstock has been a factor in food prices shooting up, the more primordial problem has been the conversion of economies that are largely food-self-sufficient into chronic food importers. Here the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) figure as much more important villains. Whether in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, the story has been the same: the destabilization of peasant producers by a one-two punch of IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs that gutted government investment in the countryside followed by the massive influx of subsidized U.S. and European Union agricultural imports after the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture pried open markets. African agriculture is a case study of how doctrinaire economics serving corporate interests can destroy a whole continent’s productive base. From Exporter to Importer At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa. Agriculture is in deep crisis, and the causes are many, including civil wars and the spread of HIV-AIDS. However, a very important part of the explanation was the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the structural adjustment programs to which most African countries were subjected as the price for getting IMF and World Bank assistance to service their external debt. Instead of triggering a virtuous spiral of growth and prosperity, structural adjustment saddled Africa with low investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption, and low output, all combining to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and decline. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced applications, lower yields, and lower investment. One would have expected the non-economist to predict this outcome, which was screened out by the Bank and Fund’s free-market paradigm. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that the withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market and private sector to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector believed that reducing state expenditures created more risk and failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the predictions of neoliberal doctrine yielded precisely the opposite: the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. In those instances where private traders did come in to replace the state, an Oxfam report noted, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.” What support the government was allowed to muster was channeled by the Bank to export agriculture – to generate the foreign exchange earnings that the state needed to service its debt to the Bank and the Fund. But, as in Ethiopia during the famine of the early 1980s, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into more and more unsuitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the Bank’s encouraging several economies undergoing adjustment to focus on export production of the same crops simultaneously often led to overproduction that then triggered a price collapse in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s program to expand cocoa production triggered a 48% drop in the international price of cocoa between 1986 and 1989, threatening, as one account put it, “to increase the vulnerability of the entire economy to the vagaries of the cocoa market.” 1 In 2002-2003, a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia. As in many other regions, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Latin America and Asia, the Bank and Fund confined themselves for the most part to macromanagement, or supervising the dismantling of the state’s economic role from above. These institutions left the dirty details of implementation to the state bureaucracies. In Africa, where they dealt with much weaker governments, the Bank and Fund micromanaged such decisions as how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired, or even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom. In other words, Bank and IMF resident proconsuls reached into the very innards of the state’s involvement in the agricultural economy to rip it up. The Role of Trade Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair trade practices on the part of the EU and the United States. Trade liberalization allowed low-priced subsidized EU beef to enter and drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, U.S. cotton growers offloaded their cotton on world markets at 20-55% of the cost of production, bankrupting West African and Central African cotton farmers in the process.2 These dismal outcomes were not accidental. As then-U.S. Agriculture Secretary John Block put it at the start of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations in 1986, “the idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agricultural products, which are available, in most cases at lower cost.”3 What Block did not say was that the lower cost of U.S. products stemmed from subsidies that were becoming more massive each year, despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase out all forms of subsidy. From $367 billion in 1995, the first year of the WTO, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Subsidies now account for 40% of the value of agricultural production in the European Union (EU) and 25% in the United States. The social consequences of structural adjustment cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”4 That was, however, a rare moment of candor. What was especially disturbing was that, as Oxford University political economist Ngaire Woods pointed out, the “seeming blindness of the Fund and Bank to the failure of their approach to sub-Saharan Africa persisted even as the studies of the IMF and the World Bank themselves failed to elicit positive investment effects.”5 The Case of Malawi This stubbornness led to tragedy in Malawi. It was a tragedy preceded by success. In 1998 and 1999, the government initiated a program to give each smallholder family a “starter pack” of free fertilizers and seeds. This followed several years of successful experimentation in which the packs were provided only to the poorest families. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after, however, is a story that will be enshrined as a classic case study in a future book on the 10 greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the drastic scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, food output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its strategic grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the crisis in food production turned into a famine in 2001-2002, there were hardly any reserves left to rush to the countryside. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF, however, was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program with the government on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets…crowd out more productive spending.” When an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government finally had enough of the Bank and IMF’s institutionalized stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy program, enabling two million households to buy fertilizer at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The results: bumper harvests for two years in a row, a surplus of one million tons of maize, and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to other countries in Southern Africa. But the World Bank, like its sister agency, still stubbornly clung to the discredited doctrine. As the Bank’s country director told the Toronto Globe and Mail, “All those farmers who begged, borrowed, and stole to buy extra fertilizer last year are now looking at that decision and rethinking it. The lower the maize price, the better for food security but worse for market development.” Fleeing Failure Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today. Owing to the absence of any clear case of success, structural adjustment has been widely discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments that once subscribed to it have distanced themselves from the Bank, the most prominent case being the official British aid agency that co-funded the latest subsidized fertilizer program in Malawi. Perhaps the motivation of these institutions is to prevent the further erosion of their diminishing influence in the continent through association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions. At the same time, they are certainly aware that Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to the conditionalities of the World Bank, IMF, and Western government aid programs. Beyond Africa, even former supporters of adjustment, like the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington and the rabidly neoliberal Economist acknowledged that the state’s abdication from agriculture was a mistake. In a recent commentary on the rise of food prices, for instance, IFPRI asserted that “rural investments have been sorely neglected in recent decades,” and says that it is time for “developing country governments [to] increase their medium- and long-term investments in agricultural research and extension, rural infrastructure, and market access for small farmers.” At the same time, the Bank and IMF’s espousal of free trade came under attack from the heart of the economics establishment itself, with a panel of luminaries headed by Princeton’s Angus Deaton accusing the Bank’s research department of being biased and “selective” in its research and presentation of data. As the old saying goes, success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan. Unable to deny the obvious, the Bank has finally acknowledged that the whole structural adjustment enterprise was a mistake, though it smuggled this concession into the middle of the 2008 World Development Report, perhaps in the hope that it would not attract too much attention. Nevertheless, it was a damning admission: Structural adjustment in the 1980’s dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs, and cooperative organization. The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private actors to take over these functions—reducing their costs, improving their quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. Too often, that didn’t happen. In some places, the state’s withdrawal was tentative at best, limiting private entry. Elsewhere, the private sector emerged only slowly and partially—mainly serving commercial farmers but leaving smallholders exposed to extensive market failures, high transaction costs and risks, and service gaps. Incomplete markets and institutional gaps impose huge costs in forgone growth and welfare losses for smallholders, threatening their competitiveness and, in many cases, their survival. In sum, biofuel production did not create but only exacerbated the global food crisis. The crisis had been building up for years, as policies promoted by the World Bank, IMF, and WTO systematically discouraged food self-sufficiency and encouraged food importation by destroying the local productive base of smallholder agriculture. Throughout Africa and the global South, these institutions and the policies they promoted are today thoroughly discredited. But whether the damage they have caused can be undone in time to avert more catastrophic consequences than we are now experiencing remains to be seen. Walden Bello is a senior analyst at Focus on the Global South, a program of Chulalongkorn University's Social Research Institute, and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). Sources 1. Charles Abugre, “Behind Crowded Shelves: as Assessment of Ghana’s Structural Adjustment Experiences, 1983-1991,” (San Francisco: food First, 1993), p. 87. 2. “Trade Talks Round Going Nowhere sans Progress in Farm Reform,” Business World (Phil), Sept. 8, 2003, p. 15 3. Quoted in “Cakes and Caviar: the Dunkel Draft and Third World Agriculture,” Ecologist, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 1993), p. 220 4. Morris Miller, Debt and the Environment: Converging Crisis (New York: UN, 1991), p. 70. 5. Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: the IMF, the World Bank, and their Borrowers (Thaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 158. Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies.

South Africa braced for massive strike

Thousands of public sector workers are expected to join one of the biggest strikes in South Africa's history on Wednesday.

Public sector trade unions have warned of a total economic shutdown.

Most of the country's schools and hospitals are already closed due to an ongoing strike over public sector pay.

Negotiations between the unions and the government are in deadlock and hundreds of striking health workers have been sacked by the government.

The unions say their activities will peak on Wednesday and have urged other workers to join them in a one-day "solidarity" strike.

"It's going to be a total shutdown tomorrow [Wednesday] in public services and the economy. It's going be a massive strike involving marches in major cities and pickets outside government buildings," said Willy Madisha, president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) labour federation.




Cosatu has predicted as many as two-million people could stay away from work.

The unions, which called the strike 12 days ago, have refused the government's revised offer of a 7.25% pay rise.

Workers, who had wanted a 12% increase, say they will not go below 10%.

Munya on National Radio New Zealand

Munya interview on Radio NZ

Here above is Munya on Radio NZ, speaking for the resistance in Zimbabwe to both Mugabe's dictatorship and the neo-liberal offensive.

Brother Gwisai made a deep impression on the comrades in Aotearoa, and we dedicate this Bob Marley song to him and all the comrades eating the tear gas in the new Chimeranga!  

Every man gotta right to decide his own destiny,  
And in this judgement there is no partiality.  
So arm in arms, with arms, we'll fight this little struggle,  
'Cause that's the only way we can overcome our little trouble.  
Brother, you're right, you're right,  
You're right, you're right, you're so right!
We gon' fight (we gon' fight), we'll have to fight (we gon' fight),  
We gonna fight (we gon' fight), fight for our rights!  
Natty Dread it in-a (Zimbabwe); Set it up in (Zimbabwe);
Mash it up-a in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Africans a-liberate (Zimbabwe), yeah.  
No more internal power struggle;  
We come together to overcome the little trouble.  
Soon we'll find out who is the real revolutionary,  
'Cause I don't want my people to be contrary.  
And, brother, you're right, you're right,  
You're right, you're right, you're so right!  
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), we gonna fight (we gon' fight)
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), fighting for our rights!  
Mash it up in-a (Zimbabwe);  
Natty trash it in-a (Zimbabwe);  
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
I'n'I a-liberate Zimbabwe.  
(Brother, you're right,) you're right,  
You're right, you're right, you're so right!  
We gon' fight (we gon' fight), we'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight),  
We gonna fight (we gon' fight), fighting for our rights!  
To divide and rule could only tear us apart;  
In everyman chest, mm - there beats a heart.  
So soon we'll find out who is the real revolutionaries;
And I don't want my people to be tricked by mercenaries.  
Brother, you're right, you're right,  
You're right, you're right, you're so right!  
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), we gonna fight (we gon' fight),  
We'll 'ave to fight (we gon' fight), fighting for our rights!
Natty trash it in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Mash it up in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Set it up in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Natty dub it in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe).  
Set it up in-a Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Africans a-liberate Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe);  
Every man got a right to decide his own destiny.

 

Zimbabwean Comrade to speak in NZ- but we need your help to get him here!

Zimbabwean Comrade to speak in NZ- but we need your help to get him here!

The CTU has been posting the LaborStart emergency bulletins from Zimbabwe recently- the trade union movement there has been leading the resistance against Mugabe's brutal dictatorship and vicious neo liberal policies. There was a General Strike last week amidst huge government oppression and a violent crackdown on the activist left.

One of the leading comrades in the struggle, Mun Gwisai, former MP for Highfield in Harare, is able to come and speak here in Auckland on Monday 23rd April. I have already approached John Minto of the Global Peace and Justice Auckland coalition about hosting a public meeting at Trades Hall, and helping meet some the costs of a return ticket to Sydney, which they have agreed to do.

BUt Mun Gwisai will also speak about the strong trade union movement battlling for its very survival in Zim, and is most keen to have the broadlest left meeting possible on Monday night. Would this be a meeting that you would like to help support financially, in the spirit of 81 and international solidarity? We are looking for concerned individuals to give a donation between 50 and a 100 dollars.

Media interest will be huge once we start promoting the meeting, and it would send a strong message back to Mugabe that the movement for democracy there has strong allies in the workers and anti racist movement of NZ.

Let me know if you can help with a pledge. Contact Joe at 021 1861450 or email solidarityjoe@yahoo.com. Please circulate this article to all supporters of the fight for freedom in Africa!