An Immense University

“Today, the entire country is an immense University”

These tremendous words form part of our beloved Fidel Castro’s Tuesday, 19 February 2008 statement, in the very next paragraph after the one where he wrote “I will neither aspire to nor accept the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief.”

Communists everywhere will be feeling great satisfaction at this new success. It is a success of the kind that every cadre dreams of and works for, namely the day when the work is passed on to others, in the safe knowledge that it will not be ruined but will continue to develop. Sometimes this moment can arrive quickly in a particular passage of struggle. At other times, comrades have to dedicate great lengths of time to a given task, or even an entire working lifetime. Comrade Fidel’s is a very good example to us, as always.

The SACP and COSATU have both issued statements. As for our beloved Fidel, he simply concludes: “I shall continue to write under the heading of ‘Reflections by comrade Fidel.’”

The next linked item below is a table of candidates for the House of Assembly and the Senate in the Zimbabwe elections scheduled for 29 March 2008. The table has been compiled from the best available information to date. It contains anomalies and therefore probably errors, too.

What the table shows is that, if the list is anything like accurate, then the conclusion must be drawn that the main, and only viable, challenge to Zanu-PF is coming from the Movement for Democratic Change, or “MDC Tsvangirai”. The latter party has matched Zanu-PF in nearly every constituency.

The combined forces of Mutambara and Makoni, on the other hand, are not nearly comparable in size to Zanu-PF, and therefore for that reason alone, they cannot win. The other small parties are practically negligible in terms of the overall challenge.

Those wishing to effect a change of government by means of this bourgeois-democratic election in Zimbabwe have in general no choice but to support the MDC (Tsvangirai), and the Presidential candidacy of Morgan Tsvangirai.

In Johannesburg, in the Constitutional Court, a great legal victory was secured yesterday, with political consequences. The Johannesburg Metro Council had been going around declaring buildings unsafe, and then criminalising the residents if they did not immediately move out. The court confirmed that evictions cannot be effected without a court order. Officials may not hide behind the building regulations. The court also found that the City’s efforts to rehouse the homeless in the specific instance had been inadequate, and in doing so, it effectively tightened up the law requiring alternative housing to be organised for evicted people. See the third linked item, below.

This is a victory for the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) and in particular for the legal activist and writer Stuart Wilson, as well as for many other individuals and organisations, and for the long-suffering poor people of Johannesburg. It is a welcome set-back for the “Potemkin Village” mentality that had been creeping into the preparations for the 2010 World Cup, whereby poor people, especially, were to be swept out of sight, with devastating consequences for them and for their families.

The political environment within the mass media in South Africa has been extremely poisonous since the 52nd ANC National Conference that took place in Polokwane in December, 2007. Yet it remains the case that well-written material in the people’s cause can, and if offered, usually will be printed even in apparently hostile media, like the Johannesburg “Star”, for example. Our last linked item is a well-written letter by Mduduzi Dlamini that was printed in that newspaper on Tuesday.

Click on these links:

Message from the Commander in Chief (1098 words)

Zimbabwe election candidates, House of Assembly and Senate (Table)

Court makes city evictions tougher, Chantelle Benjamin, B Day (332 words)

Zuma never asked for his day in court, Mduduzi Dlamini, Star (755 words)

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