All is now set for the 7th bi-annual congress of the Zimbabwe National Students Union, to be held on the 28th to the 31st of January 2010 at Chinhoyi University of Technology. Over 150 delegates, mainly students’ leaders drawn from the country’s forty four tertiary institutions will converge to deliberate on issues that have been affecting its constituency and the nation at large.
The congress is being held under the theme ‘’Defining and Entrenching a New Politics in Pursuit of the Students Revolution.” 2009 was a very difficult year for the students of the country despite the formation of the unpopular coalition government. The three days presents the students movement with an opportunity to discuss deliberate, debate issues and re-organize its structures to arrest numerous challenges ahead of us.
We are happy that this congress is coming at a time when the defective constitutional making process is now in swing. And this congress will seek to address this critical issue. It is about the people struggle for a people driven constitution. It is about the people’s struggle for democracy; human rights and the respect of the rule of law. This congress is about setting the foundation for the future, the future for future generations.
So it is from this background that the union will meet to debate on these and many other issues affecting our organization. One of the main objective of this congress is above all to address the aspirations, frustrations and struggles of the suffering students of this country, the working class people, the unemployed youth, the vulnerable groups, those infected and affected by the HI Virus who are finding it difficult to have their issues raised and listened to in a country were the bureaucratic elites seem to have found each other in the coalition government.
This congress is about the welfare of the students who continue to experience severe hardships in the country’s colleges and universities. It is about those who failed to write examinations in our colleges, schools and universities because of failure to pay the satanic and exorbitant fees being charged by most if not all tertiary institutions, the accommodation and transport woes that continue to stifle the students’ everyday.
It is about those comrades of us who got excluded from colleges for having dared to confront the ruthless administrations in our country’s colleges, those who were incarcerated in their quest to have free education and academic freedoms. Yes! This congress is about students, yes, it is about students and the future.
This congress will interrogate the politics in our broader alliance, and that alliance includes ZINASU, NCA, ZCTU and the MDC. This congress must debate the nature and character of our relationship with our allies in the democratic movement. Of late the alliance had been unhealthy and nearly on the verge of a total collapse.
The result is that the left within the MDC has been systematically side-lined and persecuted and those who associate with capital (the mafikizolos) have taken over the party, influencing policy and decision making even though their struggle credentials are extremely questionable. This congress must set the agenda and program for the democratic revolution.
We do not necessarily seek to transform the MDC into a communist party. We do not seek to do that. What we seek to achieve is to ensure that the MDC as a broad church, accommodating the left, centre and the right, all classes must contribute proportionately to the debate and decisions with the party’s democratic decision making processes.
What this means is that because the working class people, the students and the poor happen to be the majority incontestably, they must therefore have greater influence and stake in the party. That is what we seek to achieve.
Organizations within our alliance must also respect each other. We must move away from trying to undemocratically influence decisions within our alliance. We must further refrain from interfering with the democratic processes happening in other alliance partners.
However, within our organization, and in line with the theme for congress, we must start doing our political work differently. The culture of undermining political processes and democratic decision making channels must end. It is our duty and responsibility as the leadership of the students’ union to protect the organization and its image. We are therefore prepared to sacrifice our own personal interest in the event that they conflict with those of the organization and these are qualities of reliable and virtuous managers.
This organization must be preserved for future generation. The membership we recruit must be transformed from being members by their virtue of being students into cadres through political education and consciousness building. The character of some of the leaders who have emerged from this organization in the recent past leaves a lot to be desired.
Over and above our responsibility to protect our organization, we also have the similar if not more challenging responsibility within our broader democratic movement. Our movement has been hijacked by a gang of elites and degreed bandits with no struggle credentials at all. Those with no grassroots support but the dollar and are systematically using the green leaf to call the shots in the party-our party.
Our response and that of our fellow working class comrades in the trade union movement has been tepid. The threat to our movement and that to the struggle in general need not to be under-estimated. Congress must therefore look at this issue more carefully and more seriously in as far as protecting the turf for the working class movement in our multi-class movement, the MDC.
At the end of this Congress the union is expected to elect a new leadership to implement the policies and resolutions to be adopted at the gathering. It is therefore that the congress must usher in a cadre, genuine cadre of our revolution. A cadre with the intellectual capacity, political maturity, disciplines to lead the organization and above all one who sacrifice his personal interest and gain for the good of the organization. We had in the past cadres who would not raise issues within the formal structure of the organization.
We have had cadres, on several occasions that would actively and deliberately undermine the constitution, resolutions and positions of the organization in public and the media without exhausting the democratic structures of the organization as earlier on mentioned. Therefore congress must always be wary of those willing to hurt the interests of the organization, sacrificing the organization for their own selfish gains.
A true cadre should always put the interests of the organization first ahead of personal interest. We should develop a cadre who is not obsessed with material or personal gains but a cadre who is committed to serving the union selflessly and voluntarily. That must be a culture of the past. Lastly I would like to take this opportunity to salute the outgoing ZINASU National Executive Council for remaining firm and resolute to the founding principles and ideologies of the union despite challenges we faced since the last Congress in 2008.
I wish the students of Zimbabwe a successful Congress and I hope 2010 will be a much brighter year.
Blessing Vava
National Spokesperson/ Press and Communications Secretary
Zimbabwe National Students Union
