Zimbabwe - September 20, 2024

The government wants to alleviate the food crisis by sacrificing elephants

Phenomenal famine in Zimbabwe

For the working class and the poor people to eat

IMPERIALISM MUST BE EXPROPRIATED AND ITS LACKEY MNANGAGWA GOVERNMENT DEFEATED!

In Zimbabwe, 7,500,000 inhabitants -half the population-, are suffering from a phenomenal famine situation. The Mnangagwa government, fearing a revolt of the hungry that is about to break out, approved the sacrifice of 200 elephants to turn them food for our totally malnourished population, following the experience of neighboring Namibia, which has already slaughtered elephants for human consumption. They plan to dry the meat, package it and deliver it to communities suffering food shortages. The slaughter of these mammals, the first to be carried out in the country since 1988, will take place in the districts of Hwange, Mbire, Tsholotsho and Chiredzi. This is how these imperialist lackeys are trying to appease the famine we are suffering: they want to give us elephant meat! What scoundrels!

Zimbabwe is one of the poorest countries on the planet. For years we have been enduring brutal inflation, with rates over 500% in recent years and since March this year the price increase has been 55%, one of the highest levels in months. Our standard of living is very low, unemployment reaches 75% of the population. That is why about 4 to 7 million workers emigrate to neighbouring countries, especially South Africa, in search of work, to be able to put food on the table for our families.

We are told that this famine has been caused by a major drought that is ravaging Africa fue to the El Niño phenomenon, which has destroyed crops throughout southern Africa. Although it is certainly the worst drought in 40 years, which effectively Is deepening the terrible poverty throughout the continent, this is not the fundamental cause, since already in 2021 the World Bank had warned that the number of Zimbabweans living in extreme poverty exceeded 40% of its population. The public debt with the IMF was 19,9 billion dollars in 2021, that is 59.77% of its gross domestic product. (https://datosmacro.expansion/países/grupos/FMI)

Zimbabwe Is strangled, bled by the IMF and plundered by transnationals, while great natural wealth is concentrated in its soil.

In Zimbabwe, as in the rest of the African continent, the real cause of the population's starvation is not the weather factor, but the plundering of imperialism, which is taking out and away all of Zimbabwe's wealth -gold, asbestos, chromium, vanadium, palladium, lithium, nickel, copper, iron and coal- leaving scorched earth and misery for the exploited masses. With these resources and wealth that imperialism is stealing from us, the environmental damage that had been foreseen years ago could have been avoided, or even funds could have been saved for the entire population to eat, despite the drought. Imperialism is voracious in its plundering and even more so today, when its brutal colonizing offensive is deepening throughout the semi-colonial world, since in order to get out of the economic crisis, it needs to take over the sources of raw materials and enslaved labor force, multiplying the plundering of wealth by a thousand. Only in this way can imperialism get out of its crisis, first of all by placing it on the shoulders of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world.

On the arable lands that had been expropriated from the whites, the black bourgeoisie did not invest a cent, so productivity was not maintained and they had to sell them off to give them back to the whites and the transnationals of the agricultural business, which of course did not invest and did not make these lands productive for the people to eat.

Such is the plundering and disinvestment of natural resources that water is running out and there is no longer enough electricity, and there are no funds to buy it, so the power cuts are longer and longer every time, nearly 17 hours a day now.

The thesis Is affirmed that at one pole the wealth of a small handful of exploiters accumulates, and at the opposite pole the great majority of the working people and the poor peasants suffer a great famine… which they will now alleviate with elephant meat!

This is what this rotten capitalist system offers to its exploited class and the poor people. It unloads its crisis on the masses, so that they pay for it, even attacking them with wars such as in Ukraine, Palestine, where the inhabitants of Gaza, who heroically resist the genocide of the fascist Zionist State of the occupier, have no water, medicine or food and have to feed with weeds!

For the working class and the poor people to be able to live, imperialism must die.

We, the Zimbabwean workers are faced with an ironclad alternative: either we fight to defeat this system with a victorious revolution or we are assured of a path to barbarism, which we are already suffering to a large extent. Because today, faced with this catastrophe that threatens the entire working class and the poor peoples of the world, “to force the capitalists to make serious concessions, it is necessary to break their will, and this can only be achieved through a revolutionary offensive.” (Whither France? “Immediate demands and struggles for power.” L. Trotsky)

Therefore, our battle cry and that of all the exploited of the African continent will be that in order to be able to eat:

-We must expel imperialism from Zimbabwe and from the entire African continent!

-NO REPAYMENT OF THE FOREIGN DEBT! There they are the funds to be able to immediately import food, so that the working class and poor peasants can eat decently.

-We must expropriate, without compensation and under workers' control, all the transnationals that left scorched earth in the country and in the entire African continent and that continue to plunder it until it is exhausted. Let the gold, platinum, diamonds, lithium, and land return to our hands, those of the working class and the poor peasants, the true owners of these riches.

-We must expropriate all the mines that are in the hands of the transnationals that plunder the natural resources of Zimbabwe as well as those of Chinese capital that steal lithium and all the minerals to maintain the production of the imperialist transnationals based in Chinese territory and exploit us without respecting any labor law.

-Nationalization of the Banks, there we will have the necessary funds to be able to give cheap credits to the poor peasants so that they can buy seeds, fertilizers, and thus be able to produce food for the entire region.

-Let us expropriate all the property both of the white bourgeoisie and the black bourgeoisie, expropriators of our revolutions.

-Freedom for all those imprisoned for fighting!

Dissolution of all repressive forces! Self-defense committees of workers united with informal workers and the unemployed! For Committees of common soldiers so that weapons pass into the hands of the working class and the poor people!

To fight and win we need true fighting organizations, without bureaucrats

To carry out this fight we have to recover the Zimbabwe Trade Union Confederation (ZCTU) from the hands of the collaborationist bureaucracy. In 2018, they brought us to our knees at the feet of the bourgeois opposition, calling on workers to vote for the bosses' parties like Chamisa's MDC, and in 2023 they told us again that by voting for the bourgeois opposition of this recycled MDC, which is the Citizens' Coalition for Change (CCC), led by Chamisa himself, workers would live better... Pure Lies! We must regain the independence of the working class to fight for our interests, imposing the breakup of the ZCTU with the bourgeoisie! Enough is enough! Out with the bureaucrats at the service of the bosses!

Let’s re-group our ranks to build a combative, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist working class pole, to throw out the bureaucracy and take back the ZCTU and be able to defeat imperialism that plunders our wealth and its lackey Mnangagwa, too.

To confront the redoubled plundering by transnational corporations, and prepare a decisive battle against this dictatorial government, servant of imperialism, jailer of the fighters: Let’s hold assemblies in all establishments, mines, factories, elect delegates and set up a National Workers Congress to raise these demands, with delegates mandated by these assemblies, who may be recallable at any time by their bases.

For this reason, we call on the ISO, a movement that claims to be of the working class, to break with its policy that called for a vote for the MDC in 2018 and subordinated to the bureaucracy of the ZCTU, which it demands to lead the struggle, and refuses to organize the workers to break with these rotten collaborators. How can we fight for the interests of the working class and have it define its policy and have class independence without organizations capable of fighting without bureaucrats and without bosses?

We already have allies on the continent; they are our siblings in Kenya, Niger, Somalia, Senegal, South Africa. We are one class, we face the same enemy and it is the same fight throughout the subcontinent of central and southern Africa against imperialism and its servants! Let’s unify these struggles.

For a revolutionary provisional government of workers and poor peasants!

For a Federation of Black, Worker and Socialist Republics throughout Southern Africa!

James Sakala, for the Workers’ International League of Zimbabwe