HANDS OFF JOB SIKHALA! FOR MILITANT WORKING CLASS ACTION TO FREE JOB SIKHALA, THE MRP NINE AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!
Job Sikhala, affectionately known as Wiwa after the Nigerian environmental rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa, has been in pre conviction detention for over three hundred days now on trumped up and politically orchestrated charges of inciting political violence. Sikhala is the Vice Chairperson of the largest liberal and reformist opposition party, Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC). He was arrested after calling for defensive action by members of his party who were under attack from the ruling Zimbabwe African Nationalist Union, Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) youths and militias in the town of Chitungwiza where a member of the CCC had been brutally killed and mutilated by a ZANU-PF member in June last year after missing for two weeks. Sikhala had been appointed by the deceased family’s relatives to represent them.
We demand that the state immediately release Sikhala, the Mthwakazi Republic Party (MRP) nine and all political prisoners facing persecution for daring to stand up to the regime. The second republic has perfected and sharpened the oppressive tactics inherited from the first republic by openly abducting, jailing, victimising and killing ordinary masses, workers and their leaders. Such repression has been necessitated by the dictates of national economic crisis, massive looting and corruption, lack of popular support in the urban centres and need to thwart any dissent to anti-working class and anti-poor neo liberal capitalist attacks on the working masses on behalf of both wings of imperialism and local capitalists.
We submit that no regime makes a decision to be democratic or dictatorial. This is forced upon them by the prevailing conjuncture of the economy and relative stability of the regime in question administering the state on behalf of a parasitic class, the bourgeoisie. As such any response should be informed by the basic objective needs of class warfare and not reliance on any arm of government to be reasonable or amenable to mere demands without action or even waiting for elections to resolve the situation. Repression is a necessary tool for ensuring continued exploitation of workers, poor peasants and self-employed in the service of imperialism. We call for organised and active resistance to capitalist exploitation and dictatorship.
– Free Job Sikhala, the MRP nine and all political prisoners now!
– Stop the persecution and repression of the poor masses and their leaders!
– For the full right to strike, protest, assemble and expression!
– Workers to form strike committees to lead the resistance to the growing attacks on wages and working conditions of the poor and livelihood of the majority poor!
– Workers to form workers and community defence guards for defence against state violence!
– A national strike committee to organise and plan for a general strike!
– For a workers’ and poor farmer’s government on the basis of the armed people to implement decisions that benefit the workers and the poor!
– Nationalisation of big capitalist companies without indemnification to the big shareholders to be run under workers control!
– Land to be distributed to all poor peasants together with a state bank to provide cheap credit inputs to all small farmers!
– A workers’ and poor farmers’ government that defends workers, peasants and the poor masses against the local and foreign capitalists!
– An African socialist revolution as part of the international revolution that alone can guarantee a better life for all!
– A new WORLD PARTY of socialist revolution based on the TRANSITIONAL PROGRAM of 1938 to lead the revolution to end capitalism and open the road to socialism!
Revolutionary Workers Group of Zimbabwe, RWG-Z (Zimbabwe section of International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency-ILTT), 14 April 2023, Harare, Zimbabwe
