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This article participates on the following special index pages:
Operation Murambatsvina - Countrywide evictions of urban poor - Index of articles
The
battle for the cities
Brian Raftopoulos, Assoc. Prof. IDS, University of Zimbabwe
June 08, 2005
http://www.ijr.org.za/transitionaljustice/zim/rafmay/preview_popup
While the livelihoods
of the rural and urban areas in economies like Zimbabwe are closely
interdependent, the urban spaces have a specific set of dynamics
that have, in historical terms, marked out the `urban' as a particular
set of socio-economic and political relations. This has meant that
the politics of the urban areas has taken on specific characteristics,
particularly in relation to nationalist politics. While mass nationalism
grew out of urban struggles in the 1950's and 1960's and broadened
into rural struggles, the complexity of class, ethnic and generational
struggles in the urban areas provided a number of challenges for
nationalist mobilisation in the urban areas. Such complexities were
not of course absent in the rural areas, but as the nationalist
struggles became concentrated in the rural areas from the 1970's,
certain tensions and differences developed in the absence of sustained
nationalist organisation in the cities.
In addition
to this factor different traditions of anti-colonial struggle both
predated and overlapped the nationalist movement, thus providing
a complex arena of struggles, and emergent urban identities that
have continued into the present. As the nationalism of Zanu PF has
grown more intolerant of diversity and insisted on a uniformity
of outlook, the simplistic dichotomies of citizen/alien and patriot/traitor
that have marked the mobilisation strategies of the ruling party
have had difficulties in coping with the heterogeneity of urban
formations. Hence the anti-urbanism that has become one of the hallmarks
of the ruling party's authoritarian nationalism, as it has repeatedly
located national authenticity in the rural population, and hurled
insults at the `totemless' strangers living `under the spell of
the urban ill-wind' and outside of the Third Chimurenga. There is
a good deal of continuity with the colonial state in this characterisation
of urbanites, who, under settler rule were seen as temporary residents
in the cities, tolerated only as long as their labour was required.
Many of the struggles in the colonial period were precisely around
this position of the colonial state, and despite the discriminatory
policies they face, Africans made the cities their home and fought
for their rights to live and raise families in urban areas.
The act of an
independent government destroying informal settlements and displacing
thousands of workers is in every sense as destructive as its colonial
precedent. The great urban African leaders of the past like Charles
Mzingeli would have recognised the marks of such destructive interventions.
As in the colonial past the current regime has used the arguments
of criminality and urban squalor to `restore order' to the cities,
and as with past attempts this one will not solve the problem of
urban squalor. For the basis of this urban poverty is the crisis
of the reproduction of labour, and the continued failure of current
economic policy to stabilise the livelihoods of urban workers. In
fact labour is now more vulnerable in livelihood terms then it was
in 1980, having had to endure the eroding effects of falling real
wages, increased food prices and the massive cutbacks of the social
wage. This condition of labour has also been further exacerbated
by the inefficiencies of the current land policy.
As several commentators
have already pointed out, the current campaign against the informal
sector has sinister political overtones. The land occupations in
2000 and beyond were in an important sense a response to the referendum
defeat of the government in that year. After a series of electoral
defeats in the urban areas, the state responded to the urban population
by undermining their elected representative at local government
level, and corrupting such structures through a series of appointments
and policy decisions on service provision, that allowed patronage
politics to enrich the few and impoverish the city. The current
Harare Commission, appointed by the responsible Minister to do the
dirty work of the ruling party, is an absolute disgrace. At no time
in the post 1980 period, and perhaps even before that, has the capital
city been so badly run and with so little regard for the majority
of its residents.
The latest clean
up operation is an extension of the assaults of the ruling party
on a sector of the population considered `the enemy.' Moreover it
should be seen as an extension of land politics to the cities, for
in the urban areas the housing question and the informal settlements
constitute an important element of the land question. The threats
uttered and songs sung by the invading police units of `Operation
Restore Order' had all the hallmarks of the militia violence that
marked the land occupations, this time under cover of police uniforms.
It may well be that the ruling party is looking to remove the `surplus'
elements of the urban population ahead of the next presidential
election, by drawing then into more controllable rural political
relations. We will need to watch this trend.
In addition,
listening to Gono's last monetary statement, it is clear that he
had little to offer formal industry in the cities, and was more
concerned with satisfying the emerging black elite on the land and
turning Zimbabwe into one big export processing zone, dotted with
penal institutions. There is in all spheres of government policy
a continuous use of punitive language, designed to discipline, confiscate
and expropriate for the benefit of our new ruling elite. The language
of public policy has been decisively damaged by the ruthless acquisitiveness
of the state, and the destructive belief that this state is the
property of Zanu PF alone.
It is also important
to relate operation Murambatsvina to the ongoing state attacks
on the labour movement. For when examined together it becomes clearer
to see the attempts to combine controls on the city's `surplus'
population, with the destruction of a major institutional representative
of urban labour, the labour movement. It would not have escaped
the notice of the state that the ZCTU has put in place a programme
to work with the informal sector.
The agricultural
economist Bill Kinsey has observed that `Zimbabwe appears to be
becoming a more rural society as economic opportunities diminish
in other areas.' This increasing ruralisation is a result not only
of the changes on the land, but also of the shrinking of urban economic
activity. This trend has enormous political implications, because
given the state's increasing reliance on traditional authorities
in the rural areas, and given the generally undemocratic and patriarchal
nature of such authorities, the loss of urban civic spaces clearly
suits the deepening authoritarian project of the ruling party. In
short Zimbabweans are experiencing very dangerous changes in the
country's social structure, that combine the structural shrinkage
of urban spaces with a repressive anti-urban political establishment.
The long-term implications of this process do not bode well for
democratic politics.
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