Good Ideas, Wrong People
A FEW years ago a minister who is now part of the opposition Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) effectively said that the Himbas needed to be developed according to Western standards so that they can “cope with the vagaries of their environment”. To me it sounded so arrogant and aloof. The minister was, of course, trying to promote the Epupa Hydropower Project which would uproot the Himbas’ ancestral graves. Chief Kapika of the ovaHimba opposed this move in frank and uncompromising terms.
Two weeks ago, Steve Bezuidenhout, the deputy leader of RDP, was responding to a question on NBC television’s ‘Talk of The Nation’ on how we can widen participation in Namibia’s democracy. He said that we can, amongst other things, engage the San community to participate not so much based on imposed ideologies but, rather on their own terms.
I think Bezuidenhout is a bright, shining light in the land of the blind. In my opinion, the Swapo-led government was perfectly right in assessing and possibly eventually implementing Epupa. The only weakness, I believe, was employing the wrong people to market the idea.
As a student in the Nordic countries (Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark) during those trying times in Namibia’s developmental history, I met one of the ‘ambassadors of Epupa’ in Europe. After listening to the gentleman, who was a permanent secretary at the time, I thought to myself: ‘Brilliant idea, wrong promoter’. Mind you, that ‘wrong promoter’ is otherwise highly regarded. So, we have a serious problem of misplacement of cadres.
I don’t mind the appointment of people to reward them for their struggle credentials: if it wasn’t for the cadres’ sacrifices, I would not be writing this letter freely but most of all, independently from the comfort of my Swakomund apartment overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and imagining that I am only a few nautical miles from my Brazilian friends.
Let’s deploy the people in the right direction. The onus is on those who get offered positions to suggest where they can perform at their best, otherwise it was a complete waste to educate and train them.
Or do we have a national ‘policy’ of misplacement so that they can be incompetent and then we can control them’? If so, who is it benefitting?
‘The Observer’
Swakopmund