First Mugabe jettisoned the masses now it is the workers and then it will be the chefs!

National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) has already laid-off 500 workers in response to the government directive to the parastatal to implement savage job cuts. 

 

“Firstly, I would like to refute speculations that we are going to retrench 1 500 workers. We are still going through our systems . . . ensuring that we remain with a number equitable to our business operations. We have almost 500 (retrenched) so far and by Monday we should be able to give you the specifics,” said the chairman, Engineer Alvord Mabena.

 

NRZ, like all the other parastatals and the public sector itself, has suffered three and half decades of misrule as shown by the decline of its business activities. In 1998, for example, NRZ transported 18 million tonnes of good and this fell to a misery 2 million tonnes by 2010. No corrective measures were taken to address the mismanagement, corruption, bloated labour force, etc. to arrest the poor economic performance. It is only now, when the horse bolted years ago, that the regime is finally doing something to reduce NRZ’s bloated labour force, at least.

 

“We are only implementing a Government directive and it’s not only NRZ, which is doing the exercise but all the parastatals under the ministry’s portfolio such as Air Zimbabwe, CMED and Zinara,” announce Engineer Mabena.

 

Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa told parliament last week that government will be retrenching many civil servants to reduce the wage bill from the unsustainable 83% of the collected revenue to a manageable to 40%.

 

To achieve its set target reductions, there will have to be savage cuts by government, NRZ and all the other parastatals. Government will have to cut the size of the civil service by half and it is believed that NRZ will have 2 000 workers down from 8 000 workers in its 1980s hey-days. The last time the nation was subjected to similar reforms whose end result was to throw millions into far reaching economic hardships was 1990.

 

 

In 1990 and 1995 Zanu PF accepted the IMF and WB sponsored first and second five-year Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). The nation was told the nation was to accept some “belt tightening” economic reforms to revive the country’s flagging economy after a decade of Zanu PF socialism. The programmes failed to revive the economy because the economic reforms affecting the ordinary people like scrapping price controls and food subsidies were implemented but not the reforms designed reduce the ballooning ruling elite and their extravagant lifestyle. History is repeating itself!

 

The current economic reforms are savage because the economy is today in a lot worse state than it was back in 1990 because the two ESAP did not work nor did any other plans after that. The current reforms are like the ESAP of the 1990s also doomed to fail because the reforms affecting the lowly paid workers are being implemented but, again, no reforms affecting the highly paid chefs are being implemented. 

 

Most of the workers who are going to lose their jobs will be the poorly unskilled or semi-skilled workers; in NRZ, ZISCO and other institutions these workers have not been paid for a year or more anyway. It is the top managers and their board members who have been soaking up the little revenue these institutions are making; it is them who are responsible for the mismanagement and corruption; and therefore it is them who should be axed and not lowly paid workers!

 

There is never a good time for anyone to be losing their job but to do so when unemployment is already sky-high and therefore there is no chance of landing another job would be the hell-on-earth moment every one dreads. What makes the suffering of all these workers even more tragic is that their sacrifice will be all for nothing because there will be no meaningful economic recovery unless all the other underlying economic problems of mismanagement, corruption and lawlessness are dealt with too. As pointed out above, there is no political will on the part of Mugabe and Zanu PF to implement the political reforms affecting the ruling elite.

 

Life in Zimbabwe is governed by the same laws of thermodynamics and economics as is life in Britain or anywhere else on earth. Zimbabwe is in this economic mess because since independence in 1980 the nation has behave as if we were not subject to the same economic rules as other nations, as if we could buck the system by achieving economic prosperity regardless the mismanagement, etc.

 

By the 1990s, when it was clear the country’s socialist policies had failed and the economy was flagging, Zanu PF jettisoned the masses but would not implement the reforms to end the ruling elite’s wasteful lifestyle. Today with the national economy in even deeper trouble, the regime is jettisoning the few lowly paid workers who were lucky to still have a job but will, once again, do nothing to end the opulent lifestyles of the shrinking number of ruling elite. Needless to say the economic meltdown will only get worse and next time the regime will have no one but the ruling elite to jettison.