Are Namibian Trade Unions Revolutionary?
By: JACKSON MWALUNDANGEI WAS amused to read that our labour union leaders consider themselves revolutionaries. A revolutionary is someone carrying out or intending to stage a revolution.
Quoting Mao Zedong, Desderius Amutenya defines revolution as “an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another” (Namibian Sun, Feb 19, p.6). Other great revolution leaders such as Lenin, Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Ché Guevara would agree with this definition because that is exactly what they themselves did.
Led by the National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) and supported by the radicals within the Swapo Party Youth League, our unions are either parrot singing or truly intending to carry out a revolution in Namibia. Are there signs indicating the latter?
A revolution requires a fertile situation, usually in the form of an economic crisis such as low production, critical shortage of essential goods, mass unemployment, the ensuing absolute poverty and hopelessness, and lack of confidence in the political system (government). To speed up their objective, revolutionaries usually help create such conditions, for example making a country ungovernable by the ruling clique. They may even carry out a criminal activity to make the masses believe it was done by the regime so that the masses hate that regime more and actively back anybody fighting it.
In Namibia during the liberation struggle period, this strategy worked well in the forms of Oshakati First National Bank bomb blast, as well as the bomb blasts at the Atlantic Meat Market, the main Post Office and the municipal office at Walvis Bay.
The behaviour of our unions has been that of forcing businesses to close down and throw workers into mass unemployment. In so doing, they reduce production and income and increase poverty and uneasiness – thus fuelling a rebellion or revolution. They also corner the government and force it into an impossible situation.
Last year, they forced the government to increase civil servants’ salaries by eight percent, money which the government did not have and made the government fail to meet its regular obligations. This increased the national debt and made the government head for bankruptcy and total failure, a perfect situation for a revolution. Currently, the Namibia National Teachers’ Union’s Basilius Haingura is threatening ‘to take “unspecified actions” if the government fails to provide them with feedback about negotiations…’ He gave government a two-day ultimatum, a behaviour that Cabinet Secretary Frans Kapofi described as “pushing around” the government.
The unions seem to be truly out for a revolution. Like Ché Guevara and other revolutionaries, Namibian union leaders wear berets and uniforms at their congresses. They bring in selected politicians and discuss more political agendas than labour issues. They take the berets even to Parliament. Peter Ilonga and the late Ponhele ya Frans never left theirs at home!
Lenin prepared his revolution while he was leader of the Bolsheviks in parliament. His “MPs regularly formed the organising centre for collections for strikers. Using their immunity, the MPs would regularly address the strikers, demand to see and protest to the management, and denounce the police to their faces for their brutality”.
If Namibian unions under the umbrella of the NUNW truly intend to stage a revolution, they are on the right track and the nation, together with its elected government, must watch out. If the unions are merely parrot singing, then we should merely ‘forgive them, for they know not what they are doing’!
* Jackson Mwalundange is a former PLAN fighter and was a Swapo Youth League activist in the early 1970s and is now a civil society activist in Nangof Trust through the Forum For The Future.