Poverty Will Destroy Namibia
I DON’T want to sound overly pessimistic, but I think we are heading for poverty induced chaos in Namibia.
I would remind our government what some wise people once said about hunger. Pearl S Buck said “hunger makes a thief of any man” and someone else said “man is just nine meals away from committing a crime or suicide”.
In Namibia theft is a crime and must therefore be investigated and the perpetrators caught, charged and punished. The greater our ever increasing poverty problem becomes, the more thieves will need to be caught and sent to prison. To address the problem, government will, therefore, have to start building more prisons and appoint more wardens and increase the prisons budget for the additional construction work, salaries of wardens, food and clothing for the prisoners etc.
I can imagine a point where the poverty problem becomes so critical that poor people will go and steal something so openly that they can get caught and sent to prison where they will receive food and shelter.
I can also imagine specialist prisons like we have “high security” prisons but for the hungry poor we build low security “feeding prisons” where they are kept behind bars and where they can grow their own food. “Low cost housing” that need not conform to more “upmarket” humane standards because the poor “criminals” are housed in prison?
However, I don’t believe this is the preferable solution to the problem.
There are of course many other consequential problems that go with poverty like a state of anarchy that can easily develop once the poor reach a point when it’s a matter of life or death and gather their last bit of strength to ransack any source of food while the producers/owners of that food fend for themselves. This is where we are heading if we don’t act very quickly to solve the pressing problem of poverty in our country.
I write this in the same week that our well fed ministers have voted themselves new luxury vehicles and where a newspaper NOT reporting on some form of corruption is virtually non-existent.
We should also stop thinking that we work when we hold meetings.
Meetings are held to establish a better way to do our work. The biggest problem with the countless meetings held every day in Namibia is that there is no action column that goes with the minutes of the meeting.
It gets us absolutely nowhere to brag about meeting on the the poverty crisis and then when we walk out of the meeting we consider our obligation in this regard as done!
Disgusted Namibian
Windhoek