SADC : No friend of the working class
Recently, SADC (the Southern African Development Community) has been
in the news a lot. In particular, SADC has intervened militarily in
both Congo and Lesotho. SADC is a regional coalition of governments,
and its members are the governments of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho,
Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland,
Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. SADC pretends to stand for "democracy"
and "development". But the truth is different. Many of the SADC
governments, such as Swaziland and Zimbabwe, have a long history of
political oppression. And all of the SADC governments are
anti-worker. In October 1997, SADC issued a statement called the
Windhoek Declaration. This statement said that "the private sector
[is] the locomotive of economic development," and that "business
requires ... a climate in which it can develop safely, freely and
profitably".
What this means is that the bosses will play the main role in the
economy, and that government must keep the bosses happy.
In practical terms, the statement means policies such as GEAR:
privatisation, cuts in health and education spending, cuts in public
sector jobs, more VAT and PAYE, less company tax, and low wages and
few labour laws to protect workers ("flexible" labour). All of these
policies mean less jobs and less money for the working class.
Zimbabwe's form of GEAR (called ESAP) has seen mass cuts in
education spending (down to the level of 1980), health care (down 39%
in 1994-5), and jobs (22,000 jobs lost in the public sector; 33,000
in private industry).