GAPWUZ Statement

21 January 2010                                                                                               

The General Agriculture and Plantation Workers’ Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) urgently calls for a stop to the continued farm disturbances, which have resulted in a serious farm labour crisis that is threatening to completely destroy the agriculture sector.

GAPWUZ neither condones nor encourages the current attempts to deliberately take over farms by way of murdering, attacking and intimidating workers and their employers.

 What further incenses us is the silence of government officials whom we feel should be there to put a stop to such heinous acts which have left thousands of farm workers homeless and in dire need of food, education, water and sanitation. As farm workers struggle ahead to reposition themselves in the new political dispensation, they should be reminded that they are not fighting alone in the trenches. All the human rights defenders in Zimbabwe, including GAPWUZ salute the unwavering courage and charisma of many farm workers who were brutalized, maimed, tortured, kidnapped and raped in the recent farm invasions.  Such was a negative and sad development in the progress of human kind from light into darkness. However, in the same vein the inclusive government seems to pacify such a historical blind spot as a moment of madness. In such a context, the farm workers’ cause remains unanswered or negated as massive human rights abuses and the torture of farm workers on the few remaining operational farms remain the norm rather than the exception. Their echoes and sentiments are slowly but gradually sinking into oblivion even in the new inclusive government. Farm workers, you are the masters for food production. A Zimbabwean farm worker is always saturated with misery. One can imagine a farm worker living in the open air, without food, water and proper sanitation. This was 2009. Come 2010, has the fate of the farm worker improved? Obviously not. Farm workers’ demands for better welfare have been sanitized and punctuated as anti-government in different historical epochs in Zimbabwe. As GAPWUZ we have only two options: that is fighting and fighting hard. The farm workers’ struggle is like an unending thread, they have to continuously keep unwinding it. Farm workers have always been silent victims of a volatile political onslaught. We therefore salute the fight to reject paltry salaries, forced evictions and harassment, torture and abuse.  We look ahead to the restoration of the dignity, which is associated with every human being. This was a profession, which was emulated as it put Zimbabwe on the map as the bread basket for Africa. The struggle for mankind through history has been the struggle with nature and struggle with real or imagined enemies in the form of human kind.  Farm workers have been made to pay dearly for their lives as they are being imagined ‘real’ enemies of the Zanu PF land reform programme. Improvement of farm workers’ welfare in the era of the inclusive government should not come through acts of accident but through design. In Lenin’s words there is no prescribed method of struggle. Each method depends on the circumstances that exist at each particular moment in an epoch (era). ENDS For further information: Gertrude Hambira – Secretary GeneralGeneral Plantation and Agricultural Workers’ Union of Zimbabwe – HarareTel:  +263 4 734 141Cell:  +263 912 263 557E-mail:  [email protected] E-mail:  [email protected]