Scepticism in Zimbabwe about ruling on ‘legal mass firings’

WHYis anyone surprised that the Zimbabwean judiciary has just given companies carte blanche to fire their workers? About 20 000 employees have been sacked by 48 companies in Zimbabwe since the middle of July 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. President Robert Mugabe, interestingly, remarked that “this law is an a**” and vowed that the government would intervene to appeal the ruling. 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 some suspicions that the government in fact gave the court a private nod of approval. Certainly, some media are reporting that the government is at least divided about the measure. Which one can imagine.

For one thing, many of the workers so far dismissedwere employed by the country’s privately-owned media, which is 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 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.

According to Tendai Biti, who was 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 work force now comprises more than 500 000 people and is consuming about 91 percent 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 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 because they say they have been carrying too many workers for too long in a dying economy. 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 A S Unga, about Zanu-PF. “You got there not because you were particularly clever, or hard-working.”

Quite. 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? In Zimbabwe the line between party and state is virtually non-existent. So why would we expect the line between party and just about everything else, including business, to be any different?