Hands Off Our Teachers!
I READ with mixed emotions the article ‘Unruly principals could face prison’ (The Namibian, 8 April 2013 ). It was with a sense of anger and sadness that I came to realise again what has become of Namibia.
It is truly amazing that the Minister of Education, David Namwandi, could use up five hours to basically threaten the school principals! So, what is going on? Why this autocratic approach to the leaders in the education system? Why is it that the Swapo ruling elite is so worried about what is happening in education? We should try and understand what is going on.
President Pohamba was simply disingenuous following his State of the Nation address in claiming that education was always free and remains really just puppets of the capitalist system. This is also obvious in terms of the collapsing health system due to the neo-liberal capitalist diktats in the health sector as well.
Why was free primary education announced with so much fanfare if it was always free? Sorry, President Pohamba, what you claimed is obviously not true but it makes us wonder why you are so desperate to paint that kind of picture in education. The Minister of Finance, Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, also stated in an English weekly newspaper that civil servants would be paid according to their performance. What does this mean? Would this be a way in which radical teachers could be controlled? Why don’t they start with the performances of all these ineffective ministers? With such a massive unemployment rate, this Swapo-led government should have resigned a long time ago already.
The witch-hunt has started in earnest at the schools. Striking teachers have been singled out at individual schools and have been put under pressure. Is this what Namwandi wants the principals to do? At the same time, the discredited Nantu leadership is going from school to school to try and talk to teachers who have cancelled their membership of that failed teachers’ union. This is happening amidst the harassment of teachers’ leaders by the Namibian intelligence service in the form of blocking their phone calls and text messages. It is certain that the e-mails are also being intercepted and that the spooks listen in through the cellular phones which serve as effective listening devices.
The time has really arrived for a serious alternative in Namibia. The ever-perceptive Alex Kaure (‘The RDP and the politics of opposition’, The Namibian, 5 April) wrote that ‘… such an alternative must be based on a party advancing a socialist programme for the formation of a workers’ government in opposition to all the contending political representatives of big business as is the case now in our country…’ Kaure is correct in pointing out that the vast majority of political parties in this country represent the interest of the capitalists. What is called for is a political formation that would aspire to serve the working people of Namibia. Kaure continued: ‘For me the main determinant at the end of the day are the people – the masses out there. I know that the concept of class consciousness is complex and a bit ambiguous in Marxist philosophy. But the underlying notion here is that the African masses will only come of age when it makes that transition from being a ‘class in itself’ to a ‘class for itself’.” This issue raised by Kaure is crucial to debate.
Marx and Engels regarded class struggle as the means through which the working class advances from a class “in itself” to a class “for itself,” as a necessary precondition for their own self-emancipation. As Marx wrote in ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’, “Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers.… The mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and continues itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests”.
In other words, the working class of Namibia must make the transformation from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself. This can only be achieved through class struggle. The concept of class consciousness is indeed complicated in that such a pure consciousness does not exist and many Marxists prefer to rather refer to mass consciousness. Nevertheless, one of the most interesting aspects of this debate is to ask: Is Black Consciousness or African Nationalism a manifestation of a class-in-itself? Does it represent a non-class consciousness? The answer is probably: ‘Of course’. The challenge for the Left is to organise the Namibian working class into a class-for-itself.
Can the teachers of Namibia step out of the class and show the way to a class-for-itself? I am hopeful that our teachers can make this struggle possible.
KP Shitumbapo
Katutura