Morality Needs No Religion
IT IS perhaps time and a necessity for the Namibians to revisit their Constitution. Article 1 of the Constitution that establishes the ‘Republic of Namibia and Identification of its Territory’ under section (1) states that “The Republic of Namibia is hereby established as a sovereign, secular, democratic and unitary state founded upon the principles of democracy, the rule of law and justice for all.”
In a secular state there is an unambiguous separation of the state and church based on the pillars of state neutrality in religious matters and the freedom of all manner of religious practices or exercises by the citizenry individually or as organised groups.
To this end it cannot be expected of the state to promote any creed of religious practice or belief. In simple terms any state run institution or organ of the state, be it a school, university, legislature, judiciary, the executive arm (cabinet) or even an SOE is constitutionally not permitted to advance one particular belief system above any other.
The Constituent Assembly, in which some of our prominent spiritual leaders among them the cream of the crop at the CCN [Council of Churches in Namibia] sat, agreed on and adopted the notion of a secular state.
It is thus phony for the CCN to now call for a fresh debate on teaching of religious doctrine in schools 23 years down the line after acceding to constitutional secularism through its representatives in the Constituent Assembly.
While we are at it, the NBC can rightly be accused of having been violating our Constitution ever since independence based on its programming that are heavily biased towards the Christian faith as they open and conclude each day with a Christian sermon on top of the many ‘born-again-Christian’ programmes on almost all language services as well as the entire Sunday TV programming being devoted to Christian programs. Equally, the requirement for any office bearer in the employ of the state to swear on the Christian Bible and utter “So help me God” can be construed as being against the letter and spirit of the constitutional secularity.
I was, therefore, quite amazed not to read a single person raise this issue when many opinion leaders were interviewed for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung publication “The Constitution in the 21 Century” other than one opposition leader, Dirk Mudge, who indicated how a “point of material dispute” raised by Kosie Pretorius of ACN was put to bed by an assurance from Nahas Angula that secularity was basically a means of avoiding “another Iran here” (FES, 2011, p.47). Certainly that is not the essence of secularism but that is a debate for another day.
We do not need to believe in a deity in order to be moral beings and a moral educational curricular can effortlessly be developed independent of religious doctrine or indoctrination.
Jack R Kambatuku
Windhoek