The Poor Are Impotent
IS IMPOTENCE the prominent attribute describing the Namibian citizen? We Namibians who typically are poor and living on the margins of our society feel indeed impotent; we are impotent.
No, we are not sexually impotent but economically, politically and also intellectually. Others decide for us, others decide what we have to do, how we have to live and what to think and believe. Others decide how we have to vote and in spite of obeying this all, we only suffer. Our whole life is one endless suffering.
Those who rule us are also those who cannot change our misery into something better. All they do is to take more and more away from us. Where will this suffering end? Will it end in the noose at the end of a piece of wire, hanging from a tree’s branch? Many of us have nothing.
Yes, there are children and if we are lucky, there is also a man/woman in our lives – but we have little and sometimes nothing to feed our family with. We have no permanent jobs and no opportunity to get a well-paying job – we do not even have the dumpsites to feed us any longer.
We do not have houses worthy of a home; we are cold or hot, depending on the season. Our tin and plastic-shacks are also in constant danger of being demolished by our municipalities and central government is a mere onlooker.
This is so because the ‘developer’, a money-grabber, has his ‘connections’ in central and local governments and the ACC [Anti-Corruption Commission] is helpless!
Many of us now see these institutions as being exclusive. They seemingly serve exclusively the ‘haves’ and the ‘fat cats’. We the ‘others’ living at the edge of society get nothing. We do not even get the little place to be buried because it is too expensive.
Yes, we are indeed impotent whether alive or dead.
Worst of all, we are too impotent to change our society to the better; we are unable to unite all the poor in one new political party, which would be the best way to go.
This because we are divided by the constant brainwashing process of those occupying the places ‘at the table’; we are so divided that we do not trust each other and seek the origins of our misery amongst ourselves or worse still by the colonialists!
Therefore, we do not even get crumbs falling down from that national table; the eaters are great eaters, there are no crumbs left, they want to have it all, crumbs included, only for themselves.
Hilda-Evangelina Garises
Samora Machel, Katutura