Why is anyone surprised that the Zimbabwe judiciary has given companies carte blanche to fire their workers?
About 20 000 employees have been sacked by 48 companies in Zimbabwe since the middle of last month because the country’s Supreme Court ruled that it was legal to dismiss them with just three months’ notice and no other terminal benefits, nor retrenchment packages.
This measure has provoked considerable comment in Zimbabwe, including in social media. President Robert Mugabe, interestingly, remarked that “this law is an ass” and vowed that the government would intervene to take the ruling on appeal.
Yet, as always in Zimbabwe, where the independence of the judiciary has always been highly doubtful, there is some scepticism about this remark. For there are suspicions that that the government in fact gave the court a private nod of approval to pass such a controversial judgment. Certainly some media are reporting that the government is at least divided about the measure.
For one thing, many of the workers thus far dismissed through the ruling were employed by the country’s privately-owned media, which are generally critical of the ruling Zanu-PF. And the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) grew out of the labour movement in Zimbabwe and is the greater champion of workers’ rights.
Zanu-PF, for all its socialist pretentions, is not a party of workers’ interests but of the interests of the party, including its many business enterprises. After 35 years in power, it presides over an extensive network of patronage that also extends into the public domain.
According to Tendai Biti, who was the MDC secretary-general and Zimbabwe’s finance minister during the coalition government from 2009 to 2013, Zanu-PF doubled the public service in the run-up to the 2013 elections, to buy votes.
That expansion rate seems almost unbelievable. Yet what is credible is that, however quickly it got there, the public workforce now comprises more than 500 000 people and is consuming about 91% of government revenue.
So it is not hard to imagine Zanu-PF taking a cavalier, laissez-faire view of private sector employment, reasoning that the more private companies lay off workers, the more likely they are to remain profitable and therefore better able to pay their taxes to keep financing that mammoth public sector wage bill.
Public servants are worrying that the Supreme Court decision may have paved the way for Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa also to dismiss many of them in order to shrink the cost of the public sector which he has promised to do. The public servants most concerned seem to be teachers, who constitute the strongest centre of MDC support in the civil service.
Corporations have generally welcomed the court’s ruling, unsurprisingly, because they say they have been carrying too many workers for too long in a dying economy and the court’s decision has now brought them some relief.
Social media commentators have made some wry observations about Zanu-PF’s apparent ideological about-turn.
“Now suddenly these folks are market fundamentalists: if we had let the market do its thing, you would be selling sweets by the corner,” Tweeted one AS Unga, about Zanu-PF. “You got there not because you were particularly clever, or hard working.”
What Zanu-PF is doing is equivalent to climbing up to the top via government intervention, and then pushing away the ladder.
Yet why would anyone have expected anything different? The ruling party has always exploited whatever means are necessary to advance its own interests, and that includes many party business enterprises.
In Zimbabwe – as indeed in many other one party states – the line between party and state is virtually non-existent. So why would we expect the line between party and business to be any different?
Zanu-PF has ruined the country’s economy, not through bad ideology, but just plain bad, corrupt and self-serving governance. The workers laid off these past few weeks are just the latest victims of it.