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12 February 2000

(This presentation centers on the recent constitutional referendum in Zimbabwe. Ms. Amanor-Wilks prepared a small case study on this referendum as it exemplifies some of the key issues in this session of the roundtable)

On February 12/13 Zimbabweans will be asked to vote yes or no to a new draft constitution, which will replace once and for all the much-critiqued and several times amended Lancaster House Constitution. It was the historic compromise reached in that constitution, balancing the rights of minority whites with those of majority blacks, that ushered in Zimbabwean independence in April 1980.

Controversy has raged, however, over whether the new draft constitution captures the sentiments expressed at public meetings convened by the constitutional commission across the country during a three-month process of consultation. In particular the debate has centred on the powers of the executive and the commissioners’ interpretation of whether ‘the people’ expressed their wish to have an executive or ceremonial presidency. In the run-up to elections in April, attention has understandably focused on the separation of powers between the executive and the legislature and between the presidency and the proposed office of prime minister.

Much overlooked in the process has been Chapter III of the new constitution, which sets out the country’s fundamental human rights and freedoms. The new constitution considerably strengthens civil liberties, including in the areas of personal liberty, personal security, freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to dignity, freedom of speech, and – not least of all – equality before the law. This section of the proposed new constitution needs to be carefully combed by civil rights organisations for indications of how it might advance or compromise the rights of their various constituencies.

Interestingly, Zimbabwe’s human rights record has latterly attracted the most attention where it has been, perhaps, the least wanting, in practice at least. For, while the international media, together with some local media, have been preoccupied by issues such as last year’s arrests of journalists and Mugabe’s "gay-bashing", when viewed from the perspective of Zimbabwe's human rights record as a whole, these amount to isolated incidents, which, though serious infringements of civil liberties (in the case of the arrests, and a now familiar posturing in the case of the verbal abuse of gays), pale into insignificance when compared to the disregard for human rights for an entire segment of Zimbabwe's population, namely agricultural workers, who make up 25% of the formal sector labour force and between 11% and 18% of the total population, working for commercial farmers who contribute about 40% of foreign exchange earnings and 15% of the country’s GDP.

Yet, despite the obvious wealth of the commercial agriculture sector, many farm workers live in conditions of squalor and have been relegated to a system of "domestic government" (Rutherford 1996, see also Amanor-Wilks 1995) in which they continue to depend on farmer paternalism for sub-subsistence wages and perhaps food handouts, generally poor and often appalling housing and sanitation, inadequate health care and schooling for their children, and perhaps small patches of land on which to cultivate nutrition gardens. It is therefore not surprising that farm worker communities show among the highest rates of morbidity, malnutrition, mortality, and illiteracy in the country (Mugwetsi and Balleis 1994, Loewenson 1992). Lack of political representation, moreover, places farm workers among the most marginalised of Zimbabwe’s populations. Until late 1997, farm workers were barred from voting in local government elections because they are not property-owning ratepayers or rentpayers.

Farm workers have remained outside the normal governance structures available to other Zimbabwean communities largely because they have traditionally been viewed as "aliens", even though many of them are in fact Zimbabweans, and a good number second, third or fourth generation Malawians, Mozambicans and Zambians who have no other home but Zimbabwe, but because of high levels of illiteracy and lack of political representation may not have regularised their status in the country. Indeed, it was the failure of the colonial policies to procure and retain local labour for settler farmers that led to the policy of labour recruitment from neighbouring countries, such that by 1966 an estimated 54% of male agricultural labour was foreign.

This presentation focuses on the plight of Zimbabwe’s farm workers as a particularly acute example of how easily a significant sector of a population can be by-passed by worldwide trends towards greater human rights and democracy. The example also suggests a critical role for civil society in bringing to the fore human rights abuses so commonplace within a particular sector as to have assumed the appearance of normalcy. Indeed, in addition to the social welfare issues outlined above, the agricultural sector is guilty also of the more obvious forms of rights abuse, such as physical beatings and otherwise degrading treatment of workers, although the full extent of this is not generally known. Within farm worker communities themselves, women are particulary vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.

Many of the proposed changes to the current Zimbabwean constitution deserve to be hailed for their expansion of human rights in the country. For instance, Article 41 on freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment specifically states that "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment includes gender-based violence." This is a great leap forward in terms of verbalising the need to protect women from various forms of domestic violence. But what do the proposed new constitutional arrangements mean for agricultural labourers who have fallen between the cracks of development policy? In what way can the constitution’s pledge of dignity for all serve farm workers (or indeed other segments of the society) who live and work beyond the public domain in a realm inaccessible to most?

According to Article 34 of the draft Zimbabwe constitution: "Human beings and juristic persons are entitled to the rights and freedoms set out in this Chapter to the extent that those rights and freedoms can appropriately be extended to them." It is not clear to what extent commercial farm workers would be considered as an "appropriate" target group for the extension of such rights, given that they work and reside in a sector that has hitherto largely governed itself and, moreover, a sector with which the government has been at odds over its land reform programme and which, for this and other political reasons, has been reluctant to invite government intervention by way of welfare provision.

Two of the big issues facing farm worker communities are their lack of land rights and the problem of national registration. Farm workers who lack land access rights in communal areas are vulnerable to abuse on farms because they reside on the property of their employer and therefore depend on the continuation of their job for a place to live. Women employees are vulnerable because they are rarely employed as permanent workers in their own right and therefore rarely qualify to be housed independently on farms. Retired farm workers face a particularly acute social security crisis, and most especially when they are foreign migrants with no links to their countries of origin and no rights in Zimbabwe. Children represent a captive labour force for seasonal work and child labour is still prevalent on many commercial farms.

In many ways the right of farm workers to be protected under the new constitution is complicated by their unclear citizenship status. The new draft constitution provides for citizenship by birth, descent or registration. But citizenship by birth can only be bestowed if either parent was a citizen at the time of a person’s birth. In terms of citizenship by registration, the draft constitution deals only with legal adoption, minor children born of Zimbawean citizens by registration and the acquisition of citizenship through marriage. Other categories are not covered by the constitution, which calls for an act of parliament to provide for these.

While the new constitution upholds the right of children to "have a nationality from birth", in the case of farm workers, children continue to be born each day to workers who themselves have no legal status and therefore no nationality to bequeath to their children. Many farm workers, even second or third generation workers, carry national idenfication cards bearing the designation "alien". An alarming number of them have no national ID, much less birth certificates for their children. Without a birth certificate, children born on commercial farms cannot obtain a national ID. Nor can they sit Grade 7 examinations qualifying them to enter secondary school, assuming that such facilities exist within walking distance of the farms on which they reside.

Since the mid-1990s, and with the emergence of new civil society groups working to buttress a historically weak agricultural union, there is a gradually discernible move from a purely welfarist, essentially piecemeal approach towards a more transformative approach (Moyo et al, forthcoming) that seeks recognition from the state of the rights of farm workers, hitherto seen almost exclusively as ‘aliens’, to land access and national registration.

Thus, for the first time ever, the government’s 1999 land policy framework acknowledges the need for farm workers to be resettled alongside land-short peasants. At the same time, civil society lobbying since 1996 has resulted in the setting up of an inter-ministerial committee to look into the national registration issue and a recently established pilot registration programme. As of now the government’s position, is that those who entered the country as indentured labourers during the Federation years from 1953-1963, and their children, are entitled to citizenship. The government does not yet recognise the rights of workers who came into the country after 1975. This was the year of the creation of the Mozambique National Resistence (Renamo) by the erstwhile Rhodesian state. To date the perception remains that many of the agricultural workers who entered the country from Mozambique over the past 25 years were members of Renamo and should be returned as aliens along with other former refugees.

On the side of farm employers, greater pressure from civil society – and of course worries about the possible application of social clauses under new WTO arrangements – has also recently resulted in a movement among commercial farmers themselves to introduce ethical standards. Thus the Horticultural Production Council of Zimbabwe recently established a code of conduct and has taken the lead to convince other agricultural sectors that low standards of health and hygiene in the sector mean "bad business". Increasingly farmers are coming to the realisation that if they don’t adapt and change they will be hit in the pocket.

While there is now a quite discernible trend to include farm workers in government policy, and a new progressive tendency among especially younger commercial farmers, much work remains for civil society groups in the area of strengthening the voice of farm workers at the level of local government. Though given the franchise at the end of 1997, it has in practical terms been difficult for farm workers to participate meaningfully in the Rural District Councils, not least because the councils are dominated by commercial farmers, unused to sharing power or ideas with their employees. Indeed, until the unprecedented and violent 1997 nationwide stike by farm workers, the agricultural sector had been seen as composed of largely docile workers lacking the means or vision to press for democratic change. Going now beyond the voluntarist welfare approach, based, in the absence of minimum standards governing the sector, on the individual sense of responsibility of each farm employer, and shaped still by a master-servant relationship, farm workers need to be given the means to articulate their own demands and to themselves set the pace for democratic change in their sector.

References:

1. Amanor-Wilks, Dede-Esi & Contributors. 1995 In Search of Hope for Zimbabwe’s Farm Workers. Harare, Dateline Southern Africa and Panos London
2. Loewenson, Rene. 1992 Modern Plantation Agriculture: Corporate Wealth and Labour Squalor, London, Zed Books
3. Moyo, Sam, Blair Rutherford and Dede Amanor-Wilks 2000 "Transforming Social Relations for Farm Workers in Zimbabwe", forthcoming.
4. Mugwetsi, Thokozani and Balleis, Peter 1994 "The Forgotten People: The Living and Health Conditions of Farm Workers and their Families", Silveira House Social Series No 6, Gweru, Mambo Press
5. Rutherford, Blair "Traditions" of Domesticity in "Modern" Zimbabwean Politics: Race, Gender and Class in the Government of Commercial Farm Workers in Hurungwe District, PhD Thesis, McGill University

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