Namibia: The Wish To Be Poor
By: Alexactus T Kaure
THIS is now our country’s ‘anthem’: “wishing to be poor”. It’s an anthem often sung by government leaders from the president through his Cabinet and top bureaucrats; all complaining about the World Bank and the IMF classification of Namibia as an upper-middle-income country.
Meeting the World Bank country director assigned to Namibia last month; our ‘new’ prime minister, Hage Geingob, asked Asad Alam to join him in singing the ‘national anthem’ – “we wish to be poor”. But Alam was reluctant to do so because he either didn’t know the lyrics or maybe he told the PM that it “shouldn’t be your anthem at this stage/level of your country’s economic development which is healthy”.
But the PM would have nothing to do with all that and he thus went on to explain to Alam why Namibia’s status should be downgraded from being an upper-middle-income country to a lower-middle-income country. Our PM said he had been fighting for many years to have international institutions take into account Namibia’s unique situations when loans and grants were advanced. The PM further said that although Namibia has a high GDP the situation on the ground paints a different picture. He said most of the wealth of the country is in the hands of about only 10 percent of the population.
If you would allow me to quote from my late professor, Archie Mafeje: “It is generally acknowledged that Namibia is not a poor country. It is also admitted that Namibia has the worst income distribution in the world (Gini coefficient of 0.74). It is also a recognised fact that in Namibia the rate of poverty is very high, ranking from 50-65 percent of the total population”.
Yet we hear so much about Namibia being one of the best diamond and uranium-producing countries, also a major beef producer; one with the best fishing grounds in the world; a big country with a very small population. Namibia is thus truly a place of poverty amid plenty.
I’m not very fond of statistics. Just imagine to someone who has not been to Namibia, the stats that we keep on citing won’t mean much. One has to see the kind of poverty we are measuring in numbers on the faces of the ‘poor’. Surveys and the statistic they yield must be followed by extensive analysis. Such an analysis would give us an understanding of the linkages between poverty, inequality and economic progress and what options to pursue to bridge the gap between rich and poor.
These are key public policy challenges for our country. I have in the past bemoaned the fact that the PM’s office didn’t have sufficient policy analysts. Public policies in this country are hardly subjected to critical and vigorous analysis before implementation. All said and done, Marx wrote that the role of philosophy is not just to understand the world but also how to change it.
We know our problems and their causes. How to change the system is the question. Before independence we used to refer to the Namibian economy as the ‘political economy of theft’, then under the apartheid system and how that system created inequality between blacks and whites. The national liberation movement promised to radically change the system after independence.
But, alas, those who inherited state power didn’t commit ‘class suicide’. This is the view that once in power the elite would give up their own class interests and instead work for the interests of broader society. Instead the Namibian ruling and business elites took the narrow path towards self-enrichment and primitive accumulation driven by sheer greed – literally stealing from the ‘family silver’ with impunity.
Besides the self-enrichment schemes there are simply too many cases of wastage of our resources and money by our government and also lopsided/misplaced/skewed priorities. Three issues have worried me over the years. One is the annual bailouts of our parastatals, especially Air Namibia – a good candidate for privatisation. The second is the ever-increasing and inexplicable defence budget. Thirdly, money that slips through our porous borders but with no one ever held responsible. Justin Ellis correctly pointed out that: “Apparently faceless institutional means have been used to rob us as a country. However, actual and individual people are responsible for these actions.”
But foreigners who are familiar with Namibia’s political scene are not oblivious to this kind of situation. So how can our leaders realistically and convincingly canvass for foreign aid under such a situation? Thus to try convince them that we are a poor country that needs to be downgraded would be a hard sell. Money in this country is not the problem. It’s simply a question of where and how we spend it and, above all, who gets it.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said: “There are enough resources in the world to satisfy the needs of everybody but not the greed of some people.” Thus it all boils down to the way we have structured our society and economic life. Is there a Hugo Chavez out there?