The Peasants
It is reported that many peasants at the moment are feeling there has been an improvement in their life. Most are loyal to the ruling party, and the squatter movement is very quiet.
As a class the peasants have all the problems of putting forward their common interests when they are scattered and unorganised.
But it is not at all ruled out that there can be a movement of the peasants in the future. This is inevitable in fact because of the international capitalist crisis which is deepening the exploitation of the former colonial world.
Ironically, the fact of good rains and a better harvest is not a guarantee of peasant docility. On the contrary, we can expect increased demands for land from peasants who up to now have not been able to work more land because of the drought or poor financial support.
Increasingly, this layer of the peasantry (a middle peasant rather than a genuine kulak or ‘rich peasant’ class) will find its advance being cut off by party bureaucrats and the rising black land-owners well supported by the banks and monopolies—termed the ‘telephone farmers’ by the press.
The struggle for the land will soon expose these elements and open up splits between the rank and file and the ZANU(PF) leadership. The huge inequalities on the land have yet to be tackled. Up to the present only some 35,000 families out of over 350,000 needing land have been resettled.
Even though the government states that resettlement is a top priority, more money has been spent on the Sheraton Hotel alone than on resettlement in the whole 5 years since independence!
The capitalist farmers still have the use of 71% of the very best land, while the communal farmers have only 13%. There is explosive population pressure on 40% of the communal lands.
It is estimated that by the year 2000 the number of people in communal areas will have doubled— a fact which shows how out-of-date the targets for resettlement are becoming.
In these areas there is general landlessness among young families, and a high proportion of the peasants do not have any cattle or sufficient draught animals to plough. Increasingly they are dependent on the income of migrant workers in the urban areas.
In the rural areas there has been a considerable development of the co-operative movement despite peasant suspicion that co-operatives were to substitute for more generous land allocation.
But the co-operatives which are projected by the party leadership as the solution to all problems and the way forward to socialism complain they do not get the state support they need.
A disproportionate amount of state finance goes to the capitalist and ’emergent’ black farmers who are being helped to buy big farms. In 1984, for example, $49,2m was granted to 88,000 peasant farmers while 1,400 capitalist farmers were granted $115m.
In 1980 it was reported that the peasants could not understand why the workers had taken to the road of mass strikes. In the years to come, the high prices of consumer goods and general shortages will bring a greater understanding of the capitalist crisis to the peasantry.
This, in turn, will provide the basis for the coming together of the movement of the peasants and workers.
Taking up the problems and demands of the peasantry, the organised workers will be able to win increasing peasant support in the battles ahead.