ONE of the most unpleasant experiences for a traveller in a foreign country is possibly losing your wallet or your passport. In my haste to watch a Manchester United champions league football match, the first happened to me last week in the city centre of the fourth largest city in Sweden, Uppsala.
Uppsala has a population of slightly more than 200 000 inhabitants. To lose a wallet on the streets of a city with a student population of over 50 000 would ordinarily entail counting your losses. The following day I informed my colleagues about my carelessness. I was slightly reassured when one of my colleagues, who is not Swedish, hastened to add: ‘Tjiurimo, don’t be surprised, you are in one of those countries where you are likely to recover your lost wallet.’ While modestly reassuring me also, my Swedish colleagues proceeded efficiently with the necessary administrative arrangements of informing the police about my lost wallet. We provided a description of it, including its contents and received a case number. All telephonically! Being from Windhoek, and having lived in Paris, I felt these were mere formalities as I had already concluded that my wallet was gone. However, I got a call from my colleague 26 hours later or so to inform me that my wallet had been found and was ready for collection at the Police station’s lost and found section. The person who handed my wallet to the police could have been in need of the few Swedish kronor or could also have used my credit cards to purchase items. Yet nothing was taken from the wallet, including the cash. My experience is simply an entry point to highlight what is possible for a society that promotes certain values, both from the bottom and the top. Can we promote these citizen values and ethics in Namibia in light of the trajectory that we have undertaken since independence? Specifically, what can our leaders learn from their Swedish counterparts in the conduct of office? I lost and recovered my wallet during a week in which the Namibian Cabinet had an important session that was meant to discuss the Auditor General’s commissioned audit report concerning the untold waste of public resources at the Government Institutions Pensions Fund. Surprisingly Prime Minister Nahas Angula only provided Cabinet with a summary of the said report. Inasmuch as these acts by the Prime Minister shockingly highlight President Pohamba’s lack of trust in Cabinet or its members, they also speak of the absence of a desire to craft a society based on the values of the citizen in Uppsala who took my wallet to the police. Admittedly, some of the GIPF losses could be attributed to the ‘wrong’ ethical choices. Common humanity exhorts me to have sympathy for those who made decisions without intent to act corruptly. However, our sympathies, emotions or political affinities should not be expressed at the expense of the public interest. Transparency, accountability and integrity are not only sound values in political, business leaders and citizens alike, but they ought to be concretely at the heart of a political culture in a modern and progressive society. As human beings, our inbuilt imperfections mean that we can struggle daily with these. However it is another thing to struggle, and not to learn lessons about the excesses of corruption and weak governance, including their impact on the poor and vulnerable. The actions of politicians often suggest that there is no desire to deal with greed. I have long been rambling on this page that for serving ministers and senior civil servants also to be wheeling and dealing in business transactions at night and glaringly in daytime would entrench an intrinsically corrupt society in which all of us are compromised. It is frightening to see the number of boards or the shareholdings in companies that some of our senior government officials take on! Swedish government ministers would fall dead to see how members of the Namibian executive and senior civil servants serve willy-nilly on boards and own companies trading with government. The inability of the executive to trust itself on the contents of this Auditor General’s report glaringly illustrates the incestuous nature of these politically driven business transactions. Unless we do something radical very soon, we should admit that we have reached a point of no return. We can’t act as if history didn’t take place. We can’t act as if corruption and continuous cover-ups did not destroy the fabric of what should have been great African countries. It would also be reckless to act as if it was not the greed of the Ben Ali, Muammar Gaddafi and the Hosni Mubarak clans which were at the heart of the violent downfall of these kleptocracies. It is essentially on the score of lessons learned from African failures like the cases of Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe on the one hand, and successes in respect of Sweden and Japan on the other, where our leadership has failed and is failing us. Government is ultimately losing, slowly but surely, on the opportunity to craft a great Namibian society. The meek actions around the GIPF report and the general lack of transparency point in the direction of history’s spectacular failures, and not the potential future of the great Namibian society for which Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi, Samuel Maharero, Mandume ya Ndemufayo and Chief Hosea Kutako bravely fought for. Comrades are in the process of not only betraying the ideals of liberation and those who paid a heavy price with their lives – but they are also betraying the future of young Namibians!* Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari is a PhD-fellow in political science and researcher at the Center for Political Research at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, France. He is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden.
