There Are Revolutionaries, Pretenders And False Prophets
NAMIBIAN leaders (of no less stature than President Hifikepunye Pohamba and Prime Minister Hage Geingob) hailed Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela who died this week aged 58, as the greatest leader in the Third World.
Pohamba called him a “true revolutionary” who made an “outstanding contribution to economic development and uplifting the living standards” of the poor. Geingob said Chávez was a “real revolutionary and a poor people’s president”. The two Namibian politicians seem to admire Chávez to such a degree that one would have thought they’d emulate him.
Pohamba, for his part, has sparred with young turks in his own party, Swapo, castigating them for claiming they are revolutionaries, and instead stating it is his own generation that qualifies to wear this tag.
Going by the classic definition of a revolutionary, Chávez would pass the test. To be sure, he was also boisterous, bombastic and a demagogue who was a highly polarising figure at home and around the world. He was an avowed anti-capitalist.
Once he gained power through democratic means in 1998 (having failed in a military coup several years earlier), Chávez went about swiftly implementing the Bolivarian Revolution, consisting of socialist reforms that would change the landscape of oil-rich Venezuela. The Latin American country had a socio-economic setup similar to Namibia where the majority of the people are poor while the country qualifies to be a middle-income nation.
Wikipedia, the internet-based public encyclopaedia, reports that the economist Mark Weisbrot found that, “during the ... economic expansion, the poverty rate [was] cut by more than half, from 54 percent of households in the first half of 2003 to 26 percent at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty fell by 72 percent. These poverty rates measured only cash income, and did take into account increased access to health care or education.” Indeed, Chávez, even by the standards of his enemies, increased access to health and education for the poor, using the country’s oil wealth to the maximum and recklessly, according to his critics.
Under Chávez’s presidency, says Wikipedia, the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, dropped from nearly 0.5 in 1998 to 0.39 in 2011, putting Venezuela behind only Canada in the Western Hemisphere. Nicholas Kozloff, Chávez’s biographer, stated of Chávez’s economic policies: “Chávez has not only overturned capitalism, he has done much to challenge the more extreme, neo-liberal model of development.”
For all the admiration our leaders have for Chávez, they in comparison at best come across as half-baked revolutionaries of colonial times or, at worst, mere pretenders.
Namibia’s inequality has been the worst in the world for long and the picture has reportedly only improved slightly during more than 20 years of independence, but having no material effect or improvement to the poorest in the country. United Nations and World Bank research states that about 50 percent of Namibians live on about N$11 a day each, less than N$350 a month, that will make no one sleep easy.
United Nations research suggests that 10 percent of the richest adults in the world hold 85 percent of its resources, and half of that is owned by the richest one percent. Namibia fits into this pattern, which the working-class man, Chávez, despised.
We don’t necessarily need revolutionaries to fix our socio-economic challenges. We don’t even need communists and socialists to get rid of the worst kind of capitalists who have made Namibia their land of milk and honey.
What we need are honest leaders who do what they claim they set out to do for the poor and the vulnerable. The rhetoric that we have become accustomed to is slowly being exposed as the work of false prophets.
Chávez could be criticised for many shortcomings, but being a false revolutionary was not one of them. Can our leaders, for all their Chávez worship, match or try to beat that?