Call For A Youthful President
I WANT to weigh in on the ongoing debate about the next President of the Republic of Namibia, in particular the notion that the person should not be an Oshiwambo speaking since there have already been two Oshiwambo speaking presidents. Firstly I do not think that this issue should be discussed in the media, However, since Kazenambo mentioned it, I think he deserves an answer. Firstly, my thoughts are that the succession must not be taken out of Swapo. For the last few weeks the media have been airing their opinions in order to influence the outcome.
Before I air my view on succession, I want to turn my attention to three other people, namely President Pohamba, Prime Minister Nahas Angula and Minister of Finance Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila.
President Pohamba addressed Cabinet recently with the same old rhetoric of “it won’t be business as usual”. Either the President does not know what is going on or he is just simply incapable. Firstly being that the Cabinet was meeting for the last two months of its current term, we expected the President to inform them that their term will come to an end, appreciate the work they have done in the last five years and urge them to offer a smooth transition to the new cabinet and finally encourage them to clear their desks to make way for the new team. This is irrespective of the fact that he may retain some of them. Instead the President was speaking as if he was endorsing his old Cabinet as a new Cabinet. What a missed opportunity! Ironically, if the President does indeed retain half of his current cabinet, it can only lead to his own demise. This current Cabinet is incapable of delivery or reforming the economy. While history can tell me what the Nujoma presidency has done with all its imperfections, five years on I am yet to see what the Pohamba presidency has done. He sure will be forgotten. Should the president wish to keep his senior comrades on the payroll, let him push them into non-essential jobs such as Deputy Ambassadors, Deputy Ministers, first secretaries or simply give them an exit package and keep them on a monthly payroll. While it looks like a lot of money to keep them on a payroll out of government it is better to lose N$10 million in a salary bill than to lose N$10 billion in missed economic opportunities and lack of action.
Prime Minister Nahas Angula has been busy lately, from citizen Nahas offering solutions to a broken education system to asking civil servants to shape up or leave, to firing Permanent Secretaries. Well I have words for the Prime Minster: you were the Minister of Education for more than 10 years, so there is nothing that you can do to the education system now that you couldn’t do then. Moreover the analysis in his newspaper piece looks good for implementation in 1984 but definitely not in the 21st century where we live in an information technological age. The issue of performance is something that the PM was supposed to have dealt with when he came to the office. The issue of appointing Permanent Secretaries is something the PM should respectfully leave to the next PM. If he knew there were problems in government, the PM should have done something about it long time ago. I think what citizen Nahas or PM (whatever he wish to be called) is doing now is desperately trying to secure a job in the next Cabinet.
The Minister of Finance gave a very serious warning last week to her team to ensure that the development budget is spent. I recommend that a minister of finance on day one in office must start to track the implementation of the Development Budget and look at the challenges facing the nation every day in the implementation process and recommend remedial action in order for the process to move along.
Coming back to the presidential debate, my thinking is that when Presidents Nujoma and Pohamba were nominated by the Swapo Party Congress, I did not hear the Congress say they are nominated because they are Ovambos, it was simply a case of the person most qualified and with the most support. I think other non-Oshiwambo members of Swapo’s organs were all elected because they met certain criteria, not because they belonged to a certain ethnic group. I am therefore cautioning people not to discriminate against the Oshiwambo speaking people by saying that they can’t run for President. My ideal president is the one who is well qualified, articulate, inspiring, tough and young, like a Kazenambo or Dr Abraham Iyambo or even some women for example. I don’t want a President who had passed their peak. There should not be entitlement of some people to the presidency. If I look at the presidential succession Nujoma left the office at around 75 years, Pohamba is now 75 by the time he leaves he will be 80. Therefore my opinion is that we need a young president. The Pohamba presidency should be the last of really old people. We need aggressive economic growth and the only way we are going to achieve it is by having someone who understands this century in the same way that for example Geingob understood the eighties and the nineties. Swapo is just about to inaugurate its next Government and to already start talking about the next President is disrespectful to the current one and Swapo.
Thinker
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