Africa must focus on developing its economy: Ian Beddowes
Transcript of the episode with Ian Beddowes on Zim Left Radio, recorded October 2025.
Listen to audio here
Valentine 0:00:00 Hello everyone and welcome to yet another exciting episode on Zim Left Radio. Today we are joined by our regular guest to the show, Comrade Ian Beddowes.
How are you doing?
Ian Beddowes 0:00:11 I’m very well, thank you. I’m here in South Africa and we’re just watching the world as it changes at the present time. In particular, we’re very interested in what Ibrahim Traore and the other presidents, President Goïta of Mali and President Tchiani of Niger are doing because they’re not just throwing out the French, which is the colonist, they are developing their economies. They’re making sure that their gold, their uranium, the money is going back into those countries and they are using the money for development. They’re building roads, they’re making sure people have got electricity, water, food.
Valentine 0:01:14 Okay, yeah, interesting developments in the Sahel, definitely. I think Captain Ibrahim Traore and obviously the Malian Junta has captured the imagination of many people, at least many African people. Why do you think they are offering something new, Comrade Beddowes?
Ian Beddowes 0:01:29 I think primarily it’s because they are developing their countries, very poor countries by the way, much poorer than Zimbabwe. They’re developing their countries with very little resources, but what was happening is the French were taking resources like gold and uranium and all the money from those resources was going to France. Now they’re being used to develop their own countries and what is also good is that these leaders are not putting money into their own pockets. We know, for instance, that Ibrahim Traore is taking the pay of an army captain, which is what he was before the coup, not taking the pay of a president. In other words, he’s living in a modest lifestyle, which is what we all want to see our leaders do. We’ve just seen, just seen, by the way, the death of former President Mujica in Uruguay and that one was known as being the poorest president in the world. He took his full salary but he gave 90% of it away to good causes, the charity to good causes. He used to drive an old VW and just live in his old house and he lived a very modest lifestyle and people loved him for that. But more important is the question of development and in Zimbabwe we have plenty of natural resources but we’re not developing them. Now the big problem in Zimbabwe, in my view, is the way that different political parties have emphasized secondary things. I won’t say they’re not an important but secondary thing.
Valentine 0:03:46 Okay, that’s a very interesting way- Sorry, that’s an interesting point to lead me into my next question to you. Now you are the commissar of the Zimbabwe Communist Party, which I believe is a very small party and I think some people would say, well to people like you who are in small parties have a chance to even become the next ruling class. First of all, I want to understand from you whether a small party like the Zimbabwe Communist Party has the potential of becoming the next ruling party and if there are any historical precedents that we could look up to.
Ian Beddowes 0:04:24 Well the role of the Communist Party is not necessarily on its own to take power. The role of the Communist Party is to be a vanguard party, is to be the party with the best ideas and to lead within a mass movement. And the classic case is in Russia in 1917 where the rulers were the tsars, the aristocracy, and because of the conditions of the First World War, the people rose up and overthrew the tsar. Now there were workers committees in the cities known as soviets, that’s where the word soviet means. It was a workers council and also within the army they had soldiers councils. Now there were many different political parties, even within those councils. The Bolsheviks, who were the the old Communist Party in Russia, they were known as the Bolsheviks, because they had the majority in the bigger party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, but the Bolsheviks were a small party within the whole. How did they come to power? Because they had the correct idea of what to do and the workers began to see, yeah, but these guys know what they’re doing. So at the beginning of 1917 when the uprising first started, and I haven’t got time to go into all the details now, but at the beginning of 1917 there was just another party amongst the revolutionaries. By the end of 1917, October, November 1917, they were strong enough to take power because they had the right ideas and the workers could see that. So in the context of Zimbabwe we now have a political vacuum, because it’s very obvious that ZANU PF has become, whatever it was in the past, is now just a party of the looting elite. Most of them, even in terms of capitalism, do not have the skills to run a capitalist company. They get foreign companies in. We know the Chinese are there running the mines. Why can’t they run mines after 40, how many years of independence, 45 years of independence? We still do not have people who are capable of running industry, whether from a socialist point of view or from a capitalist point of view. We do not have such people. We have a class of people who just want someone else to come and run industry and then because they’re local, they just get their percentage, 10 percent of whatever it is. They live a nice life and the rest of us, if we stay in Zimbabwe, we mostly live a very poor life and then other of us come to South Africa or to Britain where the local people don’t always really want us and where we don’t want to be. So why is this happening? Because the ruling party and the ruling elite which runs that party do not know how to run the economy. I want to go back to our opposition which was the MDC and we’re not quite sure what it is now.
Valentine 0:08:40 Before you go there Comrade Beddowes, I wanted to just ask you to clarify one point because I’ve often heard the word vanguard party thrown around and for the benefit of some of our listeners, can you please explain to us what is a vanguard party and how does it differ from other or what’s the difference with other political parties of a vanguard party?
Ian Beddowes 0:09:06 Well, a vanguard party does not try to recruit as many people as possible to its ranks. A vanguard party recruits only people who are political activists and people who are willing to be politically educated if they’re not politically educated already and for those people to be deployed into existing trade unions, existing local authority or let’s say tenants associations, residents associations, all kinds of structures of the people. And as I say, if they’re already existing to go there and through hard work, not through manipulation but by hard work take the leadership and if they don’t exist, communists are there to establish new trade unions where they don’t exist, new grassroots organizations wherever. That is the role of communists. That’s the role of a vanguard party and the vanguard party also has the role of establishing a program which we can tell the people this is how we can change things and we as the Zimbabwe Communist Party have got a program called Completing the Liberation of Zimbabwe because in 1980 we thought everything was going to be fine, the British flag was taken down and we put our flag up with a red star for socialism and we thought everything was going to be better because for ordinary people it wasn’t just simply about the defeat of the white minority. For ordinary people we wanted to defeat the white minority because we wanted people to have a better life. This is what people were after, a better life. For many people, for a few they’ve had a better life but for the majority they can’t even live in their own country, they’ve had to move outside. So this is not what we fought for. Those of us who supported the liberation struggle through direct armed struggle or through various other forms of strikes and trade unions, whatever, this is not what we wanted. We wanted a Zimbabwe for the workers and peasants who are the majority.
Valentine 0:12:20 Okay, I think that’s a very good point but anyone listening to us today would say okay, you say that the party is a very small party, it has got a very low small membership but these small members are the most advanced, maybe the most conscious in society. My question then is what is the pathway to power then? What is the pathway to power once you’ve deployed these people say in trade unions and in many other organizations, how does it then consolidate into the taking over of power? I think this is very important for people to know that even if they wanted to be involved in the project, how is that eventually translating in taking state power?
Ian Beddowes 0:13:00 Right, now then what we have to do is to build a mass movement. The working class or the Communist party doesn’t stay away from the working class as a separate, you know, small little set, not by any means. We work with others who may not fully have our view but who can see the importance of organization. So we cannot win an election in Zimbabwe just by having a nice policy and then let’s say to people let’s vote for us and vote out Zana PF, it’s not going to happen. If we want to win power for the workers and peasants we must have well-organized trade unions. Number one is very important. There’s a very big informal sector in Zimbabwe, so we want those informal traders well organized. We want the small farmers, the peasants, organized. We want the residents associations in the cities and the towns, we want them organized. When they’re not only organized but have got a common general view which is led by the Communist party, then they can take power and the Communist party doesn’t have to come to power on its own. It can come to power within the mass movement. For instance, I talked about Russia over 100 years ago. The Communist party came to power within the Soviets. The Soviets are workers and peasants and soldiers. They came together led by the Communists, not all of them were Communists, led by the Communists and they took power and a country which was the size of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. That’s everything except the countries on the north coast. Can you imagine a country which is as big as South Africa, Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia and everything in between all put together? That was the size of what was then the Russian Empire which then became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with many different nationalities, religions, languages. It was there but they organized together and this country which was just as backward as Africa at the time of independence, backward peasantry using very antiquated methods. Yes, they built it and although for various reasons the Communist party was overthrown in 1991, we see that what they built wasn’t destroyed and in fact under Vladimir Putin it’s getting closer to what it used to be. Russia is a major country with a good living standard and it’s because of the work done by the Communist party in the past. So what we want now in Zimbabwe, we want to get everybody working and the key is production. Now many Zimbabweans, especially older Zimbabweans, will remember that for all their wrongdoings the Rhodesians were well organized economically. It wasn’t a big economy but even after independence we carried on with the Rhodesian style of organization which meant we had strong parastacles, currency couldn’t go on the international market, it was just a local currency and we had a certain amount of economic planning. Then in 1991 we adopted ESAP because this is what the Americans and the British and the French were telling us to do, Economic Structural Adjustment Program. Oh you must have free trade, you don’t need state planning, everybody for themselves, and yeah the current downgrade of our economy started in 1991. It started then when we gave up any form of economic planning, any kind of control of the banking system, we gave it up and had a free-for-all which a few people became very rich but the rest became poorer than they had been before. Now although the Rhodesian economy was not that advanced but still before 1991 what you bought in Zimbabwe, 80 to 90 percent was made in Zimbabwe. We didn’t have that much that was imported and we had factories now but for instance we had a strong cotton industry. We grew our own cotton, we spun our own cotton into cotton thread, we wove that cotton thread into cotton cloth, we made our own clothes from, you know people will remember David Whitehead, traditional cloths and so on were there similar with leather. We had our own leather goods, even leather jackets, even some girls had leather mini skirts, very good shoes. G&D shoes were the best based in Bulawayo. In Wero we had barter which were more general quality shoes but we made our own shoes and you even had very skilled guys who could make a pair of shoes relatively cheaply to your own feet, you know we’re all different sizes and so on, to your own feet, handmade shoes, to your design, the design that you like. We had people who could do that, we had a very good skills base and that is very important. So what our vision is for Zimbabwe is we have to get back to production. Now people want to talk about what we did during the liberation struggle which was important, we don’t throw away the liberation struggle we think was important but you can’t live in the liberation struggle. Others want to talk about the constitution but if you don’t have production a constitution will take you nowhere. Human rights, well what human rights do you have if you don’t have a job? If everybody is working things like crime levels will drop because people will have the means of subsistence and if people are getting a reasonable wage we can go there. Our education must be geared to production. We must have first of all if you’re going to get that production you have to have a system of production, energy and water are very important. Energy can split between electric power but also the power to drive our vehicles, our locomotives if we’re going to use the railways we have to have an integrated organized system. Now even with water we’ve got some areas like Manicaland and Mashonland East which we’ve got very often too much water and we’ve got Matabeleland, Mashvingo which are generally dry so we need an integrated water plan, we need an integrated electricity plant, we still have lots of coal now yet people quite correctly worried about too much smoke in the atmosphere that’s very important but we need a balanced way of doing things. For instance, people in some areas because of the breakdown the cities have moved back to rural areas they’re using solar panels which is very good for rural areas where 70% of our people live have solar panels but the solar panels we’re importing them. Why are we importing them? Why don’t we have solar panel factories which, you know, if we talk to the Chinese, the Chinese are in Zimbabwe doing mining, we know that they don’t always treat our work as well but there again our government accedes to that. We have quite reasonable labor laws in Zimbabwe but those labor laws are not enforced. Why are they not enforced? Because we don’t have a strong trade union in Zimbabwe. So you need strong trade unions, it’s not just going to happen, people must unite if they want to get something. Street traders must unite as well but then in the informal sector you can’t just be importing from South Africa or any neighboring country and just sell your stuff. In the informal sector we need to encourage those people who are producing even on a small scale.
Valentine 0:24:43 Well it appears to me then that the Zimbabwe Communist Party considers the economy as central to change right and I want you to delve into this question more like why do you think the central question is the economy? Because we often hear that for example what needs to happen in Zimbabwe is that there needs to be more respect for human rights, the constitution must be followed. Why do you think that’s not the the best way forward?
Ian Beddowes 0:25:15 Right, first of all by the way we do not deny human rights but everybody wants to work and to earn money. Wealth comes from production, that’s number one. Wealth and everybody wants some wealth, I’m not saying everybody wants to be fabulously rich like Sir Wicknell and Philip Chiyangwa, but no we don’t want to be super rich like us showing off with our wealth. But everybody wants to live in a reasonable house, have enough to eat, have food for the family, wants their children educated. We don’t all have to live a luxurious life but just have all the necessities, that’s what everybody wants. So how are we going to get there? We have to have production first. Human rights will not give us production. Production is number one. Once we’ve got production we could really talk about human rights and by the way in 2013 more than 90% of Zimbabweans voted for a new constitution which has never really been implemented and even now this current government has amended that constitution to be different from what the people voted for in 2013. So the constitution is not the major issue. The major issue is we need to produce to eat, to put clothes on our back, to build houses, that’s all production, to build houses, to make clothes, to grow food. This is production. This is the basis of everything and we know because we’re marxists and people don’t understand what marxism is, they think it’s about gorillas running around the bush with AKs. Well that was part of it, liberation struggle was part of it, but it was only supposed to be a beginning. The real thing is building the economy and having first of all to build the economy to be making things, but secondly once you build the economy is to make sure that unlike in Britain in the 19th century where Britain was a major economic power but the majority of people were really poor, many of them especially in the first half of the 19th century, people don’t know this, I think everybody was rich all the time, in the first half of the 19th century you were lucky if you lived till you were 40 because the conditions were so terrible, but why they got better is because people organized themselves into trade unions and so therefore then bit by bit through the people’s struggle their living standards were improved. Yeah they didn’t get total power, they never became a socialist country. What does socialism mean by the way? It means the social ownership of the means of production. How do you define that practically? That means that major industries are owned by the state and by a state which is working with or for the people and smaller industries are owned by cooperatives, so people come together, they form a cooperative and they make whatever it is cooperatively. So there’s different forms of social ownership and this is what we’re fighting for in the long run. It doesn’t mean to say that every single thing must be nationalized or belong to a cooperative. Yes there’s room for small traders and so on and of course there has to be, you can’t just go from a capitalist economy to a socialist economy overnight, you have to have a transitional phase. There’s got to be a transition from capitalism to socialism. We call that a national democratic economy and what does that mean practically? First of all it means that the banks throughout the world are making huge profits, must be nationally owned and even if they’re not nationally owned they must be strict banking laws regulating the banks so that they can’t charge compound in the interest where you borrow a hundred dollars and then 20 years later you’re still paying it back and you pay back some thousands. No, so if there’s proper banking regulations that doesn’t happen. Secondly, we must have national planning for water and electricity as I was saying before. Thirdly, our minerals must be nationally owned and if possible we must mine them ourselves. If not possible we bring in a foreign country or a foreign company and we say right you’re going to mine our minerals, you can take 50% of the profits from what is mine but these are our minerals, you are a contractor mining our minerals so you can take 50%, we must take 50% of the profit. Not that the foreign company comes in, makes a big hole in the ground and the people get nothing. That we cannot keep doing and this is what’s been happening in Africa, that the majority of Africa’s wealth has gone outside to Europe, to America and outside Africa very little has been used to benefit the people and now going back to what was saying about the Sahel, now for instance I’m told the figures I’ve seen is that previously uranium in Niger, which is the north of Nigeria, uranium in Niger was being mined by the French. The government that we call the Nigerien as opposed to Niger, the Nigerien government was getting 80 euro cents per kg or something like that and the French were selling it at 200-300 per kg. Now the Nigerien government before the coup that took over led by patriotic soldiers, they were getting roughly 1 billion a year in euros back into Niger. They’re now getting nearly 300 billion a year because now those mines are owned by the people, so now by the Nigerien government which is now building infrastructure. By the way, that uranium was used for electricity generation in France and other countries but only 10 percent of the people of Niger had electricity and 70 percent of that 10 percent was being taken from Nigeria to the south. That’s just a ridiculous situation. So now in Zimbabwe we want enough power generation, we can get it. We know for instance there’s natural gas in Lupane which has never been properly utilized. We’ve still got coal underground, we’ve got the sun, we’ve got solar power, we’ve got hydroelectric power at Kariba and other places. So if we look at these different power sources we couldn’t do it. We’ve got the generation of rubbish and we’re using it for landfill but in Sweden, in Austria, you know what they’re doing with rubbish? They’re burning it and using it for power generation. So there’s all these things that we need specialists to look at but we need to have a plan and look at what works for us.
Valentine 0:35:35 The other question I had for you, I think you’ve talked about water, you’ve talked about minerals and in agriculture what sort of program does ZCP propose?
Ian Beddowes 0:35:49 Right, in agriculture we have to look at each agricultural area because for instance some parts of the country are good for crops, other parts of the country are better for livestock rearing. But most of all in the ownership of land. Number one, the Zimbabwe Communist Party supports the fact that the war veterans took the land from the white farmers in 2000-2001. We support that in general. But what then happened when the two leaders of that movement died just the middle of 2001, the black elite took the best land for themselves. So I was working with Chenshui Hundry-Bordigese and the war veterans, by the way, didn’t say we must drive out the white farmers. They said we must share the land because the white farmers, yes they were invaders but many of them were fairly good farmers but the problem is that they owned multiple farms. So the original plan was we don’t throw out the white farmers but we say one family, one farm because an average farm in Zimbabwe, a commercial farm, is 1000 hectares which is very big. So if the farmland is used properly actually there’s enough land in Zimbabwe for everybody who’s serious about farming. And you see if we go to the socialist countries, Soviet Union, Cuba, China, they had land reform and the land went to the people. But it wasn’t only about ownership again, it was about production. So when land was given to people they didn’t go back to just, you know, plowing the land with bad zits, they started mechanizing, they started looking at better ways of agriculture. Now today, for instance, the world has gone away from chemical farming towards very very good ways of organic farming. The Cubans are doing a lot even in Australia. If you use the land properly, you understand crop rotation, stuff like that, you don’t need all these chemicals, you can actually make the land healthier and continually productive. And we’ve got methods that, especially in the last maybe 40 years, 30-40 years, we’ve got methods which do not need heavy investment, which we can use some fairly simple methods, but very effective methods. So we need to keep up with doing that and at the same time we don’t need, as is happening under the Mnangagwa administration, we don’t need land to be taken away from the peasants and given to the elite or to some white farmers coming back or foreign, no. We must help our rural people to improve their farming methods. Everybody must be productive who owns a farm. And what is disgusting, what we saw last year was that, and it came out in the divorce papers of Bora Moolgavik, she owned 21 farms. She’s not a farmer. We don’t want absentee farmers. Ministers do not need to own farms. Farmers must own farms, whether they’re white farmers, whether they’re black farmers, whether they’re big farmers, small farmers, they must be on the land, they must be farmers.
Valentine 0:41:06 Okay, so the other question that I have for you Comrade Beddowes is, you’ve laid out this program, you’ve started describing it and I think there are some very interesting bits in your program and I think in several respects it is different to what mainstream mobile channels like the MDC, CCC proposed. So I want you to just outline in what ways does the program of the Zimbabwe Communist Party differ from that of mainstream political parties in Zimbabwe? Because people would be asking you why are you not working with, for example, CCC or the MDC?
Ian Beddowes 0:41:52 Well it’s completely different because people think that Zanu PF and MDC are very different. They’re not. They’ve got the monetarist idea which came up in 1991 fixed in their minds. They think the thing, the important thing in the economy is to make money. Money comes from production and that’s why we had heavy inflation. I’m not sure if Zimbabwe has got the records for hyperinflation or if it was Hungary in 1946. There’s a competition between those two and different specialists will tell you, well Hungary was worse or Zimbabwe was worse but we got hyperinflation because we had this idea that was put through that the media, if people remember the early 90s, making money makes sense. It doesn’t matter how you make it, making money makes sense and by trying to make money we made ourselves really poor. I was a billionaire before I left Zimbabwe. I was a billionaire but then a loaf of bread cost 8 million. Yeah I know. And after I left it even got worse. So yeah everybody became a billionaire in Zimbabwe, even the poorest people. So that was because we put money before production. Internationally right now we’re seeing China overtaking USA and there’s a very simple basic thing there. All the Chinese banks are nationalised banks so although there’s private capital there as well, the fact is that in China they put production before money and in the USA they put money before production. China is growing, the USA is crumbling because of that very very simple thing. So we need production and then we need to plan. Now I’ve mentioned some of the things how we need to start but also I want to point out some things that we could quite easily do because we have the natural resources. We have lithium which is used for batteries especially now with the growth of solar power. We need more and more batteries of electric cars, we need lithium batteries. We’re not making as far as I know lithium batteries. There’s been some talk about it but I’m not aware that it’s actually started to be made. We need lithium batteries made from the lithium which comes from the ground. Before we knew much about lithium we were producing iron, chrome and nickel. Those are the three components of stainless steel. But we import ball bearings, we’ve been importing ball bearings from all over. I know we used to import from Sweden, I’m not sure if we still do, but we import stainless steel products. Pakistan makes stainless steel pots and pans. Why can’t we do it? We’ve got the basic materials. Why can’t we set up factories even if we need help from foreign countries? You know 50-50 deal, we need a plan. Why can’t we make our own things there? We have gold, we have platinum, we have diamonds, we have emeralds, we have semi-precious stones like garnet and aquamarine. I don’t see that we’re making jewellery. Why can’t we send, let’s say, for instance, we see people who make this cheap costume jewellery, something that’s very beautiful, traditional jewellery, and they’re obviously good with their hats. Why can’t we say, send some of these people to India to learn how they make jewellery in India, and some more, send them to Italy to see how they make jewellery in Italy. Send some selected people and then bring them back, and they exchange their ideas in how to make high quality jewellery, and we make jewellery in Zimbabwe with our own gold and platinum and precious stones, semi-precious stones. Why can’t we do that? Well, some would argue because the class interest that would, you know, maybe favour processing of raw materials are very, there are no class interests, you know, so the class of people that is ruling today is a class of compradors that are just, as you said, out to make deals.
Valentine 0:47:20 Exactly. So the question that I have for you is how do you envisage a situation where the oppressed classes take over power, because then I think for as long as the oppressed classes are not in power, right, these will remain ideas, and I think for me how do we get those?
Ian Beddowes 0:47:56 People can only.. it’s up to the people. Here we can give the ideas as communists, but the people have to be organised and be prepared to fight. Our ancestors in Zimbabwe, recent ancestors, in 1948 there was a general strike, by the way, that was the year I was born, 1948 there was a general strike by workers in what was then Southern Rhodesia, they went on strike. In 1945 there was a railway strike before that, so, and then others, especially, it really started 1957, but got serious around 1960, bit by bit. There was armed struggle. People were willing to die for the liberation of Zimbabwe. Now people seem to be frightened. Now I remember there was a great Mexican revolutionary, a guy called Zapata, when the Mexicans were all semi-slaves, there were serfs, and his slogan was why are you fighting and you’re suddenly getting killed? He said it’s better for us to die on our feet than to live on our knees. How long are the people going to accept poverty and not organise themselves? We’ve had organisation in the past in Zimbabwe, people must start to organise. No one is going to liberate you. Well, we can tell you what you need to do, but no one is going to liberate Zimbabweans. What they must do is see how can we organise, and it’s not always fighting these guys. Sometimes it’s setting up local economies which are not controlled by these people, and then if the elite try and take over, then you fight back. Well, we must have organisation at every level.
Valentine 0:50:30 Yes, absolutely, but then we also see that people are organised under the banners like for example CCC, for example now Blessed Gheza, which in my view seem to lead people to dead ends. Now how do you counter that? Because you might have someone who generally believed in the politics of these people, how do you counter against what seems on progressive politics? Because often these are the people who talk about rights and constitutions, and as you said earlier, no one here is suggesting that they are not important things, but these guys make it the primary concern. So if you look at the programme of people like Gheza, they’re always pointing fingers that these people are stealing, so if we remove the people who are stealing, then all our problems will be over. But I don’t believe that it’s a matter of simply removing some faces and putting in new faces. It is an issue of economic transformation as you have already attributed to. So my question is, I think already we do, it’s not a fact, it’s not, this decision is not such that there is no opposition. The opposition is there, but it is leading people to dead ends, and how do we give people the tools to sift the rubbish, so to speak?
Ian Beddowes 0:51:38 Well, our job as the Zimbabwe Communist Party, and I think we’ve done it to some small degree, is to politically educate the people of where you have to go. Because if we see NDC, the idea for the NDC as a Workers’ Party was initially good, but then they get in the pockets of the British and the Americans. They want to reverse the liberation struggle altogether, so you have to understand what you’re doing. We want to produce an economy which is there for the majority of Zimbabweans, and we can do it in various ways. But if we don’t understand that production comes first, we will never get anywhere, and we must never ever listen to the Western imperialists. They’re the ones who colonize Africa, and then they try to tell us about democracy. And again, we go back to the Sahel, where we’re told that they overthrew democratically elected governments. Now, for instance, Niger is a very good case, where there was a so-called democratic president, but like I said before, all the uranium was going out of the country. What’s the use of the election if someone outside controls your finance, controls your minerals, controls all the companies that come in? That’s what was happening, and even controls the election. It becomes meaningless. Real democracy means rule of the people, so if you don’t control the means of production by which you get the food which goes into your mouth, unless you control that, you don’t have democracy. Just to put a cross on a piece of paper every five years, that is not democracy. It’s not. You get democracy when you have control over your life, because democracy comes from a Greek word which means rule of the people. It’s not about voting, yeah, it can be useful at times, but it’s not the central issue. Do not confuse democracy and voting. They’re two separate issues. They’re related, they’re not the same. I think the greatest tragedy in real democracy means when the people collectively have got at least some control over society, over production, over what makes their lives better.
Valentine 0:55:07 Absolutely, and I think the greatest tragedy for Africa has been that we were hoodwinked into thinking that once we got independence in the 1960s, and that now that you are in government or you are wearing a suit and occupying some of the offices that the former colonial masters had been in, and we thought that was democracy, and then obviously putting an X. In South Africa, you will recall in ‘94 Nelson Mandela saying, this is the first time that I’m voting in my life, and that was supposed to be a good thing. And then as you say, I think just the act of simply putting a cross on a piece of paper whilst you have an empty stomach, whilst you have no job, whilst you are not properly clothed or nourished is ridiculous, and I think this is why I think I find your ideas very interesting.
Ian Beddowes 0:55:59 Even in South Africa, correctly, the South African Communist Party refers to 1994 as the democratic breakthrough, not as the end of the struggle, the democratic breakthrough. And when in 1996 South Africa brought in the GEA program, which is similar to ISAP in Zimbabwe, the South African Communist Party called this the class project, because all they were interested in doing was creating a black elite, which did very little for the black majority. So again, there’s a lot of confusion over indigenous empowerment as it is in Zimbabwe or black empowerment as it is in South Africa, because for the most part, those guys do not even own the companies.
Valentine 0:57:16 Well, but you know why the South Africans got the model for black economic empowerment? It was in Zimbabwe, because in Zimbabwe, what happened is in the 90s, early 90s, that’s when this indigenous business development cooperation, that’s where you have Strive Masiwa, who are coming from, and many other elites, who during the liberation struggle, they never participated. They were either in hiding or had gone to Europe to study whilst the peasants were fighting it out for liberation. And then when independence came, they started demanding that, yeah, we need to control the economy. But they were not suggesting that the people who were in the bushes are the ones that control the economy. No, it was this elite, this group of elite people. I’ve written a lot even in my PhD about the indigenous business development cooperation. And it was just about incorporating a few black guys. Now, what happened in the 90s in Zimbabwe was kind of what you then saw in South Africa, but now on steroids, because they had a sort of working model. Because then in South Africa, it was the same thing. You just get your shares from MTN or whatever, just because you have a black face. It was called black economic empowerment.
Ian Beddowes 0:58:35 Yeah, and what’s worse in South Africa, for instance, is you’ve got big white-owned companies are forced to give sub-contracts to BEE guys. And what does that mean? It’s that the worker has got an extra boss to pay. And I always give, because myself, I worked in the building industry most of my working life. What does that mean? That a bricklayer or a carpenter who was working for a big white-owned company previously would have a permanent job, or at least as long as he didn’t do anything very bad, would have a permanent job with certain benefits, he would belong to a trade union. Very far from perfect, but then BEE comes along, and now what you get is someone who’s close to the ANC but doesn’t know anything about building, will get a sub-contract from the big white-owned company. And then because he doesn’t know anything about building, we have in South Africa Zimbabweans and Mozambicans who are good in building, you know, and they would give out another sub-contract to a genuine builder who would be employing others. What does that do for the worker? Instead of paying one boss, he’s paying three bosses before he gets his money, and he doesn’t have security of employment. So now, it’s not, for instance, in the case of the national democratic revolution, if a capitalist is going to come to our country, or is already in our country, and wants to introduce an industry which was not there before, even though it’s capitalist, we still encourage them, because we were not doing this before. This is a new means of employment for the people, it’s a new set of skills. So under the national democratic revolution, we encourage that kind of capitalism, because we need that innovation. But these guys are not innovators, they’re just taking extra money out of the hands of the workers. So there’s a difference there that people need to understand, because what we’re talking about for the major middle will be owned or controlled by the state, and the state will have a share in major industries, like they used to, with the Zim steel and these various other things. But don’t include the state-owned. And then, let’s say, someone, I talked about, what you call it, about stainless steel. Maybe someone comes in who knows about stainless steel, who is a capitalist, will say, no, fine, you set it up. And as long as you pay your workers reasonably, at this stage of development, we need that.
Valentine 1:02:08 Okay, so one of the things that caught my attention as I was reading your program on completing the liberation of Zimbabwe, which you say will give power to the workers and peasants, is that you referred to someone called David Stirling. And as you already know, Comrade Beddowes, I’m based in Scotland now, and Stirling is a few miles from where I live, and I’ve been to the town of Stirling. And the other day, as I was driving in the Scottish countryside, I passed by a place called the David Stirling Memorial. And I thought to myself, as I was reading your program, this guy must have done something great for the British Empire. And I don’t know much about this history. So I think as a final question to you, I think, because you say, I think reading your program, it appears to me that David Stirling was active in 1949, maybe just a year after you were born. So I wanted you to tell me, because David Stirling is a figure that I think it’s got like, this guy is big. So I want to know why is he big?
Ian Beddowes 1:03:16 Right. David Stirling came from a Scottish upper class family. During the Second World War, he formed Special Air Services, SAS, the famous British Special Operations Unit. So he was a very good soldier, but he was also very anti-communist, anti-working class, very much on the right. Now, for an imperialist, he was also, he was not a racist, I must say. He was very far-looking. He was not a racist in the normal terminology. In 1949, it was clear to him, as an imperialist, that the white Rhodesians would not be able to hold on to power forever. He saw that it would be useful to have, to train young blacks, intelligent young blacks, in southern Africa, to work for imperialism, not for the independence of their own country to work for imperialism. In 1949, he set up the Capricorn Africa Society. And the Capricorn Africa Society, one of its things was said that they advocate in those days, every person above a certain education level must get the vote, whatever their color. But not the vote for the whole people, but these people who are more advanced. Now, one of the most famous in Zimbabwean history, Leopold Takawira, was a full-time employee of David Stirling. Oh, by the way, I didn’t say as well that he created a spy organization within the British trade unions, which were to quite a great extent led by communists, to try and get rid of the communists. He set up a blacklist of British trade unionists. So he was very, very anti-communist, anything to do with the working class. And he also set up nursery organizations in some different countries. So he was very much on the other side. And by the way, in Britain in 1974, there was a partial coup, which in the end, in 1975, forced out Harold Wilson. The army took over the Heathrow airport in 1974, and there was some discussion that went on. And eventually Harold Wilson, the moderately progressive Labour prime minister, was forced to resign in 1975, because the whole of the British ruling class, of which David Stirling was a part, actually got him out of power. And if anybody here is in Britain, they may remember that the very good Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was even forced out of the Labour party. And that was done by MI5, British internal intelligence, and they put this current prime minister, Keir Starmer, in power. That was done by British intelligence, which is under the control of the old British upper class. So anyway, that’s where Stirling came from.
Valentine 1:08:00 Was Stirling involved in the coup of 1974?
Ian Beddowes 1:08:10 Yes, he was supposed to be. He was going to be the leader. The coup never became a coup in full, but it was like a partial coup, if you like. But had there been a all-out coup, he was going to be the leader. Now, what had happened in the liberation movement in Zimbabwe? Let’s briefly go through it. I did mention 1948 was the general strike, of which the main leader was Benjamin Burombo, who was, by the way, based in Bulawayo. And this is another thing I want Zimbabweans to hear. The main leader in Bulawaya was Benjamin Burombo, who was a Shona. At exactly the same time, in Salisbury, the main leader was Charles Mzingeli, who was an Ndebele. That could never happen today because of the way that the society has become tribalized. That came from outside. That came from Leopold Takawera, who was the employee of David Stirling. Why did it start? Because the leader of the liberation movement, he wasn’t perfect, was Joshua Nkomo, who was in the Beile. He was selected in 1957 when the old Southern Rhodesian African National Congress came together with the city youth of Salisbury, led by people like James Chikarema, George Nyandoro. The people in the South in Bulawayo, which by the way was the main industrial center at that time, JZ Moyo and Joseph Mzika, came together from there. That was the only still existing branch of the Southern Rhodesian ANC. The city youth under Nyandoro, James Chikarema, came together and they revived the Southern Rhodesian ANC. They called Joshua Nkomo to become the leader. He was leading the biggest trade union, which was the railway workers union, at that time. No one at that time was talking about Shona or Ndebele. It was a very minor issue. Now, the SRANC was banned in 1959 and was then reformed in the beginning of 1960. The Southern Rhodesian ANC, because a lot of lies talked about at the beginning of the liberation movement, the movement sent the first people to go for military training. Only six of them were sent to Ghana. The leader of that group was a guy called Mark and Zira Basanya. They went for training in Ghana. By the way, Robert Mugabe, who was not involved in politics at that time, was teaching at the Teachers Training College and he was recruited by JZ Moyo, who went for the passing out ceremony of these first six comrades who went for training. So anybody who tells you that the second Chimurenga started in 1966 is not telling the truth. The beginning of the armed struggle started way before that. The first arms that came into Zimbabwe came a bit later, 1962, were given to Joshua Nkomo by Nasser, the great leader of the Egyptian people, and they were sent to Zimbabwe for armed struggle. Now, people in what was by then the movement was called ZAPU. Those people who belonged to the Capricorn Africa Society, namely number one was Leopold Takawira, number two Herbert Chitepo, were anti-communists. And we don’t know exactly the role of British intelligence, but they had been let’s say guided by British intelligence. And they split away at Bumsano in 1963 because they were anti-communists. But they couldn’t tell the people of Zimbabwe, we’re leaving Nkomo because he’s going to get arms from the Soviets. They had to make an excuse and that excuse was Nkomo isn’t the best.
Valentine 1:14:22 So probably David Stirling had a hand in splitting the liberation movement in Zimbabwe.
Ian Beddowes 1:14:32 Almost certainly, and people listen to this if they don’t believe me. You can go simply to Wikipedia. Go to Wikipedia, look at the name David Stirling. When you’ve seen the name David Stirling and you’ve read that section, then go to Capricorn Africa Society, it’s also on Wikipedia. When you’ve read about Capricorn Africa Society, then go to Leopold Takuwira. It’s not very difficult to join the very big dots. And you’ll see how that started. So then that’s when the start of this Shona Ndebele business happened because Takawira, the guy who was working for Stirling, said we cannot be led by this huge Ndebele man. But anyway, the arms struggle did not start in 1966. It started quite a deal before that and already in the 1960s there was heavy disruption of things in the north of Zimbabwe, across the north of Zimbabwe. There was real disruption which was created by the beginnings of the armed struggle. I just wanted to- ah yes, I know the point I wanted to make. You know, just a simple thing to get across to people, that Dynamos Football Club was a project of ZAPU because people think ZAPU, Highlanders, ZANU, Dynamos. No, Dynamos started as a ZAPU project. And if you look at the name Dynamos, where did it come from? It came from the Soviet Union. You had Moscow Dynamos, Kiev Dynamos, and the club was formed under that name actually to upset the Rhodesians.
Valentine 1:17:20 Yeah, we should do another episode on history in the next few weeks, but I think for today we leave it here comrade. Thank you so much for your time. Any last comments?
Ian Beddowes 1:17:32 Yeah, any last comments? Yeah, just one minute. Let’s organize production, we’ll never get out of poverty. Production must come first. Okay. You may not like the Chinese, but the Chinese have done well because they put production first.
Valentine 1:17:40 Right, that’s a good point. And I’ll attach the program of the ZAPU community in the show notes. And yeah, thank you so much for your time today.
