Thatcher’s Lessons For Namibia
By: ARTHUR PICKERING
I WAS in detention – together with many other political activists – in the Gobabis prison in 1979 when we learnt that Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party had won the British general elections. We were disappointed because the consensus at the time was that a Conservative government would be unsympathetic to Namibia’s quest for independence.
In October the following year, I left for Britain and my family joined me three months later. For the next 10 years I lived and worked in London. During this period, Margaret Thatcher not only transformed British society but also changed my thinking on politics and economics – especially on socialism.
Before I left Namibia, I had been attracted to socialism, in particular its critique of capitalism. However, in Britain, I wanted to learn more about socialism: what its goals were, how it would achieve them and whether countries such as Cuba, the Soviet Union, Sweden or Tanzania were models of socialism.
As it happened, I visited Tanzania on several occasions during the 1980s. I was disappointed with Dar es Salaam which I found to be drab and depressing. The Tanzanians I met (including two black Americans) were demoralised by the socialist experience. The only people who seemed to enjoy life and their work were the scores of aid workers, mostly from Scandinavia.
Julius Nyerere’s socialist dream had started with the 1967 Arusha Declaration which stated: “To build and maintain socialism, it is essential that all the major means of production and exchange in the nation are controlled and owned by the peasants through the machinery of their government and their cooperatives.”
In accordance with this goal, land, commercial estates and banks were nationalised. In fact, Nyerere boasted that within one week he had nationalised all the capitalist firms. To run the economy, he established parastatals or state-owned enterprises (SOE), and at one stage they numbered over 400.
But by the end of the 1980s, the socialist dream had collapsed. The policy of ‘’villagisation’’ had so disrupted agriculture that crops like maize that had once been exported had to be imported. In 1984, the Nordic countries which had been his staunchest supporters advised him to change course. By this time, it was clear to Nyerere that socialism had failed. As he confessed: “If I called back the British to look at their estates, they would laugh at us because we have ruined them.”
Whereas Nyerere pursued statist policies to uplift his people, Margaret Thatcher believed that a market economy was the answer to Britain’s woes. She not only privatised the SOEs such as British Telecom and British Airways but also encouraged ordinary people to buy shares in these privatised companies, thereby creating what was called a share-owning democracy.
But what impressed me about her market-driven policies was the desire to restore the sense of personal responsibility in British society: the idea that you were responsible for your own life and for the choices you make and that you cannot be a dependant of the nanny state. She, therefore, encouraged tenants to buy their council houses. In support of these policies she favoured small government and low taxes. As she put it: “The larger the slice taken by government, the smaller the cake available for everyone.”
I believe that Margaret Thatcher’s policies hold lessons for us in Namibia. I want to mention three: firstly, that the government, namely, politicians and bureaucrats cannot create wealth or sustainable jobs. The belief that the government gets involved in the economy in order to help the peasants or the working class or the poor or the people is a fallacy. Government’s involvement in the economy is to promote and protect the interests of politicians and their cronies. In Namibia, we need a smaller government.
Why, for example, do we have a Ministry of Youth, National Service, Sports and Culture or a Ministry of Gender Equality and Child Welfare? What are they supposed to do? And do we need all the missions abroad and what about all those SOEs? At independence, there were three of them. Now, according to one source, there are more than 40. Most of them are a burden on the tax payer. The answer is to privatise or dismantle them.
Secondly, wealth and real jobs are created by entrepreneurs whether in the informal small or medium business sectors. What we need is to create an environment favourable to business, to remove constraints to new entrants, to encourage young people to take risks and enter the business world, to make our labour laws more flexible and generally to adopt policies that have worked for the Asian Tigers – Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.
Thirdly, although culture is not normally associated with the Thatcher revolution, it is clear that her policies were premised on a change in attitudes and behaviour regarding work, savings, honesty and other traditional values. This is how she put it: “My policies are based not on some economics theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest day’s work for and honest day’s pay; live within your means; put by a nest egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.”
*Arthur Pickering is a retired advocate