A Political Economy Of Failure?
By: Tsudao Gurirab
UNTIL a few months ago our Minister of Defence Nahas Angula served as the country’s prime minister. The prime minister’s portfolio is a weighty one and includes the responsibility to coordinate the work of the Cabinet, be the principal advisor to the President and serve as the leader of the government business in Parliament.
But then Angula was not new to government business before assuming the burdensome Office of the Prime Minister. He has been a regular, since independence, in the Cabinet chamber wearing all manner of hats, so to speak. It is to be regretted that he did not relish the experience, judging from what he told Windhoek Observer.
“I am happy to be out [of] there… That office has too much pressure and one has to deal with so many things,” he remarked about his tenure.
The issues we wish to interrogate, for now, arise from the minister’s article of last week Friday, in this paper, on diversity and divergence, which appeared under his nom de plume of ‘Citizen Nahas Angula’. It is an interesting but troubling piece of writing. It seeks to elevate denialism to state religion and coaxes us to buy into this. We shouldn’t. It is an attempt to turn the long suffering public complicit in the misrule of our country.
While we have not yet had sight of the World Food Programme’s report of May this year, the fact is that the last 23 years have not narrowed but widened the gap between the poor and the rich. The fact is that, in comparison to our regional peers, we get less value for our basic and, therefore, fundamental education. The fact is that our health services leave much to be desired. The fact is that we have a new and growing phenomenon of malnutrition.
The truth is that the character of our colonial economy has hardly changed. It is an open secret that we continue to parcel out our birthright to both old and new exploiters and are satisfied that a few benefit from the crumbs of our slavish deference to foreign capital.
The fact is that we have a top-heavy political system. Surely, from this government we can learn many a lesson about voracious and fruitless spending where the myriads of ministries we have a minister, a deputy minister and a special advisor. We see SOEs [state enterprises that are anything but enterprising] that drain the treasury and local and regional authorities which play lottery with public funds without any care in this world.
No, Citizen Angula, we do not need a ministry of community development. Of course, rural folk will continue to flock to Arandis and other growth points not only in response to the logic of development but also because our government has failed to take development to the people.
Government’s Early Warning Unit is intended to be of aid in decision-making and budgeting. And surely, even this government should know that their intelligence ought to find a way in all our plans, as a rule. While we do not have insight of World Food programme’s report of May this year , a similar report of 2009 on the Northern Communal Areas make the point that, …”crop yields in communal areas are very low compared to those obtained in the commercial sector. This is despite the fact that communal areas of Namibia have the highest rainfall in the country…”
They point out that the low use of improved seeds and fertilisers; fencing off of large tracks of communal land; lack of credit; not properly surveyed land under cultivation among others help to contribute towards this under-performance. It is by addressing these and other enabling interventions that government can assist the small farmer to make their efforts worth their while.
The dumping of people on resettlement farms and trucking food for their survival was always dead in the water. The fact that an increasing number of Namibians live off the social pension may be a revelation to the Citizen. He may wish to know that many more Namibians who need this safety net are further excluded through a bureaucratic guillotine.
The ebullient property prices reported last week only add to the overflowing basket of policy failures. The housing shortage is largely a function of lack of serviced land. It is a complete and mindless scandal for a country of plenty latent resources of two million souls. The government alone is responsible for this artificial supply bottleneck of serviced land.
Building contractors and prospective home owners stand ready to buy the land and/or houses. And despite a Cabinet of at least two local authorities per region not more have been promulgated. What about Bukalo? Or did the party’s electoral calculations get the better of the national development agenda?
No, the delimitation commission is not responsible for any social strife. That is circuitous reasoning. Why only now and not in the past? The answer lies elsewhere, and that is in a failure to mould a single nation, compounded by government’s voodoo economics and incoherent social policies which threaten to turn decent Namibians into shack and dumpsite dwellers.