An Open Letter To Swapo: DEAR Swapo ‘Government’

Before I decide who to vote for, I would like you to answer the following questions. Will you respect these basic human rights?

•The right to an education, even when I’m not related to a Swapo government minister.•The right to a political association, after you label opposition party leaders as ‘treasonous’ and when they are physically attacked by your supporters when they legally gather.•The right to a safe environment. No, don’t answer this one. I’ll just pay for my own security.•The right to healthcare. •The right to own property. With your pro-Mugabe attitude, can I have your specific assurance that the property I buy with the money I have earned through honest and hard labour each day will indeed remain mine until I choose to dispose of it?•The right to employment. Will you appoint me based on my talent, hard work and education, or will you rather appoint someone on the basis of his/her skin colour and according to who his/her parents were?•My right to live. When the Father of my Nation threatens to shoot me in the head?•The right to dignity. Read The Namibian SMSes of 12/11/09. There was an SMS from a man in Katutura who is disabled and has no family, at least not in Government. He cannot buy a wheelchair for himself. We don’t want bicycles for all, we just want the basic necessities. We don’t want you to drive luxury cars when some of us cannot even leave our houses.•The right to travel safely. I’ll excuse you if you didn’t hear me over the wail of your sirens. You will drive us off the roads we paid for, in the cars we paid for with the petrol we paid for, but you won’t even stop. Do you know what will happen to me if I do that with MY boss on my way to work?•The right to equality before the law. I wanted to start a business, found a white investor with the right credentials and the courage to risk his own money to prove himself. You declined the application for a work permit. You who never worked in a commercial business before, let alone ran it profitably. Yet construction sites are overrun with common Chinese labourers that contribute nothing to the Namibian economy. Show me their tax registrations. You can’t, because these poor people are not governed by the same minimal standards you yourself set to prevent the exploitation of workers. They cannot pay tax because they do not earn enough. Yet you look the other way when the perpetrators are brownish instead of pink? Equality? You sentence a stock thief to a minimum of 20 years in prison yet you steal millions more, but there is no minimum sentence for your kind?•My right to privacy. When you promise to employ the struggle children in the spy factory? When you could have used them to improve service levels in basically every single governmental department and parastatal? When you could have used the opportunity to teach them internationally acceptable skills? This clearly shows that you plan to spy even more and better on those who pay you. But you, ladies and fat gentlemen, you have the transparency of those black Volvos you drive, the ones with the tinted windows; you can see me but I cannot see you.•Freedom of speech. Lift that criminal ban on The Namibian, and we can talk.•The right to be treated with respect. You stand there, before the crowds which we feed, denouncing me and my forefathers, just so that you can drive a shiny car? What have you done to uplift these people? You take what is theirs and use it as your own.You are not even in Parliament when the laws get passed that decide their future!I’m a child of this country too. I pay my taxes and I paid for my crimes. Now you stand down and do the same. Let someone else do the job. For 20 years we stood helplessly on the sidelines, witnessing how you destroyed and squandered not only infrastructure and our natural resources, but the very fabric of an entire nation by your constant hate talk. We have endured enough accusations about our forefathers. They have messed up our past and we cannot change that. But you are messing up our future! We have earned the basic human right to a competent, honest and caring government. Right now this is not you.Phone that person in Katutura. Get him a wheelchair, now! Earn my vote, because, contrary to what you think, you cannot steal everything forever.Arthur GötzVia e-mail