Determinism Or Human Agency? Which Way Namibia?

* With Earth’s first Clay They did the last Man’s knead, And then of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed: Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

A German friend of mine, and former Director of the UN Information Centre in Harare, was recently reminiscing about what she regards as the differences between African and Asian world views. Essentially her point was that Africans tend to read too much into the past, whereas the Asians tend to have a forward-looking disposition.The above quotation, from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and my German friend’s observation touches on two important philosophical conceptions of history or worldviews.One is determinism, the view that most events, including human cognition and action, are causally determined by a chain of prior decisions and occurrences over which we have little or no control.In the context of contemporary Africa, these deterministic forces centre on the European colonial project which negatively affected the whole continent save for Ethiopia and Liberia.(Although these two exceptions look even worse than those which were colonised).Some argue that these colonial forces are still haunting the continent and thus arresting, or worse, determining, its development agenda and thus destiny.The opposite of determinism is free will or human agency.Wikipedia Encyclopedia defines human agency as the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.It further says that human agency invests a moral component into a given situation.And if the situation is the consequence of human decision-making, persons may be under a duty to apply value judgements to the consequences of their decisions, and be held responsible for those decisions.Human agency entitles the observer to ask: should this have occurred; was this the right course of action? These two views have become recurrent themes in both everyday discussion and academic discourse about Africa’s development trajectory.Sometimes they are simply cast, or counter-posed, in terms of external and internal factors shaping the future of Africa.Now, anyone who read through Professor André du Pisani’s comments on my piece in his: ‘Towards A Vision of a Just Society?’ in The Namibian of February 18, 2005, or President Thabo Mbeki’s three-part series carried recently in the New African magazine outlining and justifying why the Asian Tigers developed the way they did; would recognise a lot of the deterministic machine at work in their pieces.Prof Du Pisani concluded that “It is simply unfair to burden one person [Nujoma] with the subjection and destitution of the poor, under- and unemployment in our country.”And he went on to describe the context that is said to have constrained Nujoma’s and Swapo’s actions in redressing the gross inequality in our society.The following are cited as having been among the major constraints: the negotiated transition to independence; the character and nature of the Namibian state; the mental inheritance of colonial rule; the personality traits of Nujoma; the policy of national reconciliation and the difficulty of sustaining radicalism in a context of neo-liberal economics.This apologetic statement will surely sound like Jackson Kaujeua’s music to Nujoma and Swapo’s ears since it emanates from one of our most respected scholars and public intellectuals.Prof Du Pisani then introduces the ‘essentially contested’ concept of justice, more precisely the absence of a vision of a just society in Namibia.And in a sense, that partly answers the question as to why Nujoma denied much of the earlier commitment to justice in the post-independence era.Some possible answers to that question were provided in my previous piece, thus no need for rehearsal.In this intervention, I interrogate the context that is said to have acted as an impediment to a progressive change in the socio-economic sphere and to show that perhaps much of the explanation must be sought elsewhere, including the absence of a vision of a just society, as Du Pisani correctly points out.Added to that would be the lack of commitment to egalitarianism and respect for the notion of citizenship by those responsible for policy-making in Namibia and the continent as a whole.And lastly, wrong public policies and priorities complete the picture.In January 1990, I wrote a piece in the then Times of Namibia, ‘The Capitalist Vanguard State: A note for free-market Economists’, in which I tried, pre-emptively, to debunk the myth, that is now rearing its head 15 years later, of the so-called ‘minimalist and non-interventionist’ liberal state.I argued then that in its early (mercantile) stages, everywhere, the capitalist project was a state project or at least spearheaded by it.Major roads, bridges and railway lines could not be built by profit maximising firms and neither could they provide education, health and security.States have to do them.Simply put: capitalism has never been averse to a helping hand from the state.In fact, the whole globalisation agenda is being advocated and pushed by governments, Western governments, on behalf of their trans/multi-national corporations.And I don’t see why it should be different in the context of Namibia or, more broadly, Africa.While on the economy, it is now easily forgotten that even the very liberal Namibian Constitution explicitly makes a case for a robust public sector economy.But the Government, under the leadership of former President Nujoma, decided to treat the public economy as a private realm.Essentially following the same capitalist logic of exploitation and exclusion.There is simply no reason, for example, why the fishing sector cannot be revamped and re-organised to benefit society at large instead of the small clique that have access to the fishing quotas year in year out.The absence of a progressive policy in this regard cannot be blamed on the policy of national reconciliation, nor the liberal constitution, nor on nation-building, or on the nature of transition to independence etc.It is simply a question of a country, perhaps unconsciously, following the wrong policies.Personally, I think we are consciously following policies that we know are morally, intellectually and economically bankrupt but because they suit the selfish interests of the dominant minority responsible for policy-making, the country has no choice but to follow.As they say: there are always good reasons for following the wrong policies.My favourite example is the Namibian Government’s decision to buy the Chevrolets cars for the Police Department and others.This case will become a classic one for students of business studies and public policy in years to come.The Government had many choices on this front but decided for the Chevs.That’s what free will and choice is all about.But it still puzzles me how the Government arrived at that choice or was Namibia simply a target of opportunity on the part of Barden International? Back to transition.Our transition does not even come close, in terms of constraints, to what Zimbabwe faced in the 1980s.Namibia has had a much greater room for manoeuvre and a lot of solidarity and support from the international community.Still it is generally accepted that Zimbabwe was successful on the educational and land fronts for the good part of the 1980s before ‘the revolution lost its way’ (in the memorable phrase of Andrew Astrow).The point is that good money doesn’t make bad policies good.Our educational and health sectors are testimony to this bitter truth.We throw a lot of money at ill-conceived policies, at decisions taken in bedrooms instead of boardrooms and at bad projects, i.e.Air Namibia.Unfortunately, Namibia doesn’t have many people, at the policy-making level, who are prepared to think through issues in a critical and reflective fashion.We are usually satisfied with anything that goes by the name of public policy.The internal coherence and strengths, let alone the implications of such policies on the economy and society, are never subjected to any critical interrogation, questioning or public debate.And that explains why there isn’t much interaction and synergy between the country’s research centres and the policy-making apparatus in government, public and private enterprises.There is, for example, a good study done by NEPRU, authored by Dr.Peter Manning, on the fishing sector which, if it has been followed by those making policies in this crucial area of our economy; maybe we could have partly averted the present chaos in which the industry finds itself in.How about the policy of national reconciliation and the attendant politics of accommodation that is said acted as a prison of some sort? My immediate reaction is this: What was, or is, the alternative to reconciliation? For one, the policy is artificially taken to mean ‘no revenge’.Which begs the question: revenge by whom and against whom? Wasn’t the liberation struggle, by its own claim and definition, meant to liberate both the oppressor and the oppressed? And perhaps there was no need for the policy in the first place? Our friends across the Orange River do not have a policy of national reconciliation entrenched in their constitution and yet they are not at one another’s throats and have you noticed how they discuss sensitive issues such as the retention of Afrikaans as one of the national languages or even the re-naming of places e.g.the recent debate about the name Pretoria.Namibians have to change their blinkered way of looking at and understanding the world.One of the reasons for this is that Namibians refuse or are unable to think hard enough and to think critically, independently and laterally, to borrow from de Bono.We are intellectually too lazy and we have no culture of speaking the truth, tending instead to believe in our own propaganda (an offshoot of the liberation struggle’s era and the current politics of correct-speak).We are simply frozen in the past and thus unable to confront our own condition in a mature, realistic, forward-looking and self-reliant manner, always being haunted by the ghost of colonialism.For, example, we want to be classified as a least-developed economy while we are a middle-income country, simply because our policy-makers are unable or incapable of coming up with creative and progressive solutions to problems, especially the twin issues of unemployment and large-scale poverty.And after we lost favour with the Europeans, we have now turned to the Asians for investment in and assistance to Namibia in an effort to tackle our problems.Maybe this is a good move for South-South co-operation.There is another aspect to this culture of mediocrity that outside observers are not aware of about Namibia.This is the fact that a good number of our Masters and now even some PhD holders have not gone through the normal schooling circle, meaning that this group of people don’t have high school diplomas or first degrees.You have too many people without any solid educational background – it’s like a high-rise building without a proper foundation.Blame it on colonialism and apartheid.But these are the very people occupying managerial and policy-making positions and thus expected to function in the complex world of policy-formulation and making with any degree of sophistication and understanding.Hannah Arendt once wrote that a person can have all the technical know-how but without an understanding of how the bits and pieces fit together to make up for the big picture, that person is nothing.And one of my friends usually tells me that we simply have too many people who are certificated but not educated.So, you don’t have many thinkers and reflective people, only functionaries – people trained to push papers and files.This is the dilemma that Namibia is facing right now.The system is simply tired and is showing the cracks wrought by a bureaucracy that was ill-prepared for the intricacies of state and nation building project and the challenges of the 21st century.And as Rukee Tjingaete wrote recently: “Namibia as a country suffers from the tendency of using wrong people in wrong positions to say the wrong things at the wrong time”.Ultimately, what the Namibian elite lack, to borrow Karl Mannheim’s concept, is a utopia, a set of ideas to inspire the transformation of the inherited socio-economic order and relations and thus the liberation of human capacities and the improvement of the human condition.So, at the end of the day, our Asian friends would say: this is what colonialism did to us but we have to forge ahead and move away from that condition.Thus Mbeki’s argument that the Asian Tigers developed because of the Cold War politics that led to large-scale capital infusion by the West, especially the USA, in these countries economies sounds pretty attractive but is not the whole story.The point is that most of these countries, especially Taiwan and South Korea, embarked, earlier on, on large-scale agrarian reforms that revolutionised their rural economies which in turn stimulated industrial growth.The case of China is also instructive and flies in the face of Mbeki’s argument.China didn’t benefit from this capital infusion during the Cold War but yet it is now widely acknowledged that it is over-taking most of the Asian Tigers in almost all aspects of development.The Africans, on the other hand, would say: colonialism has deformed us so much and there is nothing much we can do about our condition.History has overly determined our fate and place in the world and is still doing so.It’s like the story of the ghost.It is always somewhere and nowhere.Now it was here and then there, but you never get to see it.Colonialism is thus everywhere and like the ghost, there is nothing we can do about it.Take, for example, Thabo Mbeki’s pet-project: NEPAD.It’s supposed to be an African grand project taking the continent to greater heights.But as usual, you have the so-called development partners being brought in, to dish out the required US$64 billion annually, and eventually defining its finer contours and thus direction.But this in line with Mbeki’s thinking as evidenced by his presentation of the Asian story – there must be a helping hand out there.There is basically nothing that Africa can do on its own and do well.’Why does nobody care about blacks’ was a recent headline in the self-professed Africanist magazine – the New African.Begging the question: why should others care for us? There is a central contradiction in all this drama and confusion that Africa has to solve before she can realistically hope to embark on a meaningful road to development: how do you reconcile Africa’s seemingly abundant natural resources and its widespread poverty and misery? Something is fundamentally wrong somewhere.That is why some scholars are now questioning whether having abundant natural resources necessarily leads to national development and an affluent society? Professor Archie Mafeye, for one, doesn’t think so.In a recent paper, he argued that the availability of a well-developed human capital is more important to development than the mere possession of natural resources.But in addition to aptitude, we also need the right mix of attitude and culture too.The case of Singapore, basically a city-state, is instructive in this regard.And so is Malaysia, which attained its independence at the same time as Ghana, both from Britain in 1957.They look pretty different from each other today.The simple conclusion is that maybe there is something ‘African’ about the African condition.But, surely, there should be a way out of this colonial straightjacket? Or will Africa, to paraphrase two recent titles, remains ‘a continent that self-destructs’ and ‘a continent for the taking’? * Alexactus T.Kaure is a Namibian freelance writer and social critic.Essentially her point was that Africans tend to read too much into the past, whereas the Asians tend to have a forward-looking disposition.The above quotation, from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and my German friend’s observation touches on two important philosophical conceptions of history or worldviews.One is determinism, the view that most events, including human cognition and action, are causally determined by a chain of prior decisions and occurrences over which we have little or no control.In the context of contemporary Africa, these deterministic forces centre on the European colonial project which negatively affected the whole continent save for Ethiopia and Liberia.(Although these two exceptions look even worse than those which were colonised).Some argue that these colonial forces are still haunting the continent and thus arresting, or worse, determining, its development agenda and thus destiny.The opposite of determinism is free will or human agency.Wikipedia Encyclopedia defines human agency as the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world.It further says that human agency invests a moral component into a given situation.And if the situation is the consequence of human decision-making, persons may be under a duty to apply value judgements to the consequences of their decisions, and be held responsible for those decisions.Human agency entitles the observer to ask: should this have occurred; was this the right course of action? These two views have become recurrent themes in both everyday discussion and academic discourse about Africa’s development trajectory.Sometimes they are simply cast, or counter-posed, in terms of external and internal factors shaping the future of Africa.Now, anyone who read through Professor André du Pisani’s comments on my piece in his: ‘Towards A Vision of a Just Society?’ in The Namibian of February 18, 2005, or President Thabo Mbeki’s three-part series carried recently in the New African magazine outlining and justifying why the Asian Tigers developed the way they did; would recognise a lot of the deterministic machine at work in their pieces.Prof Du Pisani concluded that “It is simply unfair to burden one person [Nujoma] with the subjection and destitution of the poor, under- and unemployment in our country.”And he went on to describe the context that is said to have constrained Nujoma’s and Swapo’s actions in redressing the gross inequality in our society.The following are cited as having been among the major constraints: the negotiated transition to independence; the character and nature of the Namibian state; the mental inheritance of colonial rule; the personality traits of Nujoma; the policy of national reconciliation and the difficulty of sustaining radicalism in a context of neo-liberal economics.This apologetic statement will surely sound like Jackson Kaujeua’s music to Nujoma and Swapo’s ears since it emanates from one of our most respected scholars and public intellectuals.Prof Du Pisani then introduces the ‘essentially contested’ concept of justice, more precisely the absence of a vision of a just society in Namibia.And in a sense, that partly answers the question as to why Nujoma denied much of the earlier commitment to justice in the post-independence era.Some possible answers to that question were provided in my previous piece, thus no need for rehearsal.In this intervention, I interrogate the context that is said to have acted as an impediment to a progressive change in the socio-economic sphere and to show that perhaps much of the explanation must be sought elsewhere, including the absence of a vision of a just society, as Du Pisani correctly points out.Added to that would be the lack of commitment to egalitarianism and respect for the notion of citizenship by those responsible for policy-making in Namibia and the continent as a whole.And lastly, wrong public policies and priorities complete the picture.In January 1990, I wrote a piece in the then Times of Namibia, ‘The Capitalist Vanguard State: A note for free-market Economists’, in which I tried, pre-emptively, to debunk the myth, that is now rearing its head 15 years later, of the so-called ‘minimalist and non-interventionist’ liberal state.I argued then that in its early (mercantile) stages, everywhere, the capitalist project was a state project or at least spearheaded by it.Major roads, bridges and railway lines could not be built by profit maximising firms and neither could they provide education, health and security.States have to do them.Simply put: capitalism has never been averse to a helping hand from the state.In fact, the whole globalisation agenda is being advocated and pushed by governments, Western governments, on behalf of their trans/multi-national corporations.And I don’t see why it should be different in the context of Namibia or, more broadly, Africa. While on the economy, it is now easily forgotten that even the very liberal Namibian Constitution explicitly makes a case for a robust public sector economy.But the Government, under the leadership of former President Nujoma, decided to treat the public economy as a private realm.Essentially following the same capitalist logic of exploitation and exclusion.There is simply no reason, for example, why the fishing sector cannot be revamped and re-organised to benefit society at large instead of the small clique that have access to the fishing quotas year in year out.The absence of a progressive policy in this regard cannot be blamed on the policy of national reconciliation, nor the liberal constitution, nor on nation-building, or on the nature of transition to independence etc.It is simply a question of a country, perhaps unconsciously, following the wrong policies.Personally, I think we are consciously following policies that we know are morally, intellectually and economically bankrupt but because they suit the selfish interests of the dominant minority responsible for policy-making, the country has no choice but to follow.As they say: there are always good reasons for following the wrong policies.My favourite example is the Namibian Government’s decision to buy the Chevrolets cars for the Police Department and others.This case will become a classic one for students of business studies and public policy in years to come.The Government had many choices on this front but decided for the Chevs.That’s what free will and choice is all about.But it still puzzles me how the Government arrived at that choice or was Namibia simply a target of opportunity on the part of Barden International? Back to transition.Our transition does not even come close, in terms of constraints, to what Zimbabwe faced in the 1980s.Namibia has had a much greater room for manoeuvre and a lot of solidarity and support from the international community.Still it is generally accepted that Zimbabwe was successful on the educational and land fronts for the good part of the 1980s before ‘the revolution lost its way’ (in the memorable phrase of Andrew Astrow).The point is that good money doesn’t make bad policies good.Our educational and health sectors are testimony to this bitter truth.We throw a lot of money at ill-conceived policies, at decisions taken in bedrooms instead of boardrooms and at bad projects, i.e.Air Namibia.Unfortunately, Namibia doesn’t have many people, at the policy-making level, who are prepared to think through issues in a critical and reflective fashion.We are usually satisfied with anything that goes by the name of public policy.The internal coherence and strengths, let alone the implications of such policies on the economy and society, are never subjected to any critical interrogation, questioning or public debate.And that explains why there isn’t much interaction and synergy between the country’s research centres and the policy-making apparatus in government, public and private enterprises.There is, for example, a good study done by NEPRU, authored by Dr.Peter Manning, on the fishing sector which, if it has been followed by those making policies in this crucial area of our economy; maybe we could have partly averted the present chaos in which the industry finds itself in.How about the policy of national reconciliation and the attendant politics of accommodation that is said acted as a prison of some sort? My immediate reaction is this: What was, or is, the alternative to reconciliation? For one, the policy is artificially taken to mean ‘no revenge’.Which begs the question: revenge by whom and against whom? Wasn’t the liberation struggle, by its own claim and definition, meant to liberate both the oppressor and the oppressed? And perhaps there was no need for the policy in the first place? Our friends across the Orange River do not have a policy of national reconciliation entrenched in their constitution and yet they are not at one another’s throats and have you noticed how they discuss sensitive issues such as the retention of Afrikaans as one of the national languages or even the re-naming of places e.g.the recent debate about the name Pretoria.Namibians have to change their blinkered way of looking at and understanding the world.One of the reasons for this is that Namibians refuse or are unable to think hard enough and to think critically, independently and laterally, to borrow from de Bono.We are intellectually too lazy and we have no culture of speaking the truth, tending instead to believe in our own propaganda (an offshoot of the liberation struggle’s era and the current politics of correct-speak).We are simply frozen in the past and thus unable to confront our own condition in a mature, realistic, forward-looking and self-reliant manner, always being haunted by the ghost of colonialism.For, example, we want to be classified as a least-developed economy while we are a middle-income country, simply because our policy-makers are unable or incapable of coming up with creative and progressive solutions to problems, especially the twin issues of unemployment and large-scale poverty.And after we lost favour with the Europeans, we have now turned to the Asians for investment in and assistance to Namibia in an effort to tackle our problems.Maybe this is a good move for South-South co-operation.There is another aspect to this culture of mediocrity that outside observers are not aware of about Namibia.This is the fact that a good number of our Masters and now even some PhD holders have not gone through the normal schooling circle, meaning that this group of people don’t have high school diplomas or first degrees.You have too many people without any solid educational background – it’s like a high-rise building without a proper foundation.Blame it on colonialism and apartheid.But these are the very people occupying managerial and policy-making positions and thus expected to function in the complex world of policy-formulation and making with any degree of sophistication and understanding.Hannah Arendt once wrote that a person can have all the technical know-how but without an understanding of how the bits and pieces fit together to make up for the big picture, that person is nothing.And one of my friends usually tells me that we simply have too many people who are certificated but not educated.So, you don’t have many thinkers and reflective people, only functionaries – people trained to push papers and files.This is the dilemma that Namibia is facing right now.The system is simply tired and is showing the cracks wrought by a bureaucracy that was ill-prepared for the intricacies of state and nation building project and the challenges of the 21st century.And as Rukee Tjingaete wrote recently: “Namibia as a country suffers from the tendency of using wrong people in wrong positions to say the wrong things at the wrong time”.Ultimately, what the Namibian elite lack, to borrow Karl Mannheim’s concept, is a utopia, a set of ideas to inspire the transformation of the inherited socio-economic order and relations and thus the liberation of human capacities and the improvement of the human condition.So, at the end of the day, our Asian friends would say: this is what colonialism did to us but we have to forge ahead and move away from that condition.Thus Mbeki’s argument that the Asian Tigers developed because of the Cold War politics that led to large-scale capital infusion by the West, especially the USA, in these countries economies sounds pretty attractive but is not the whole story.The point is that most of these countries, especially Taiwan and South Korea, embarked, earlier on, on large-scale agrarian reforms that revolutionised their rural economies which in turn stimulated industrial growth.The case of China is also instructive and flies in the face of Mbeki’s argument.China didn’t benefit from this capital infusion during the Cold War but yet it is now widely acknowledged that it is over-taking most of the Asian Tigers in almost all aspects of development.The Africans, on the other hand, would say: colonialism has deformed us so much and there is nothing much we can do about our condition.History has overly determined our fate and place in the world and is still doing so.It’s like the story of the ghost.It is always somewhere and nowhere.Now it was here and then there, but you never get to see it.Colonialism is thus everywhere and like the ghost, there is nothing we can do about it.Take, for example, Thabo Mbeki’s pet-project: NEPAD.It’s supposed to be an African grand project taking the continent to greater heights.But as usual, you have the so-called development partners being brought in, to dish out the required US$64 billion annually, and eventually defining its finer contours and thus direction.But this in line with Mbeki’s thinking as evidenced by his presentation of the Asian story – there must be a helping hand out there.There is basically nothing that Africa can do on its own and do well.’Why does nobody care about blacks’ was a recent headline in the self-professed Africanist magazine – the New African.Begging the question: why should others care for us? There is a central contradiction in all this drama and confusion that Africa has to solve before she can realistically hope to embark on a meaningful road to development: how do you reconcile Africa’s seemingly abundant natural resources and its widespread poverty and misery? Something is fundamentally wrong somewhere.That is why some scholars are now questioning whether having abundant natural resources necessarily leads to national development and an affluent society? Professor Archie Mafeye, for one, doesn’t think so.In a recent paper, he argued that the availability of a well-developed human capital is more important to development than the mere possession of natural resources.But in addition to aptitude, we also need the right mix of attitude and culture too.The case of Singapore, basically a city-state, is instructive in this regard.And so is Malaysia, which attained its independence at the same time as Ghana, both from Britain in 1957.They look pretty different from each other today.The simple conclusion is that maybe there is something ‘African’ about the African condition.But, surely, there should be a way out of this colonial straightjacket? Or will Africa, to paraphrase two recent titles, remains ‘a continent that self-destructs’ and ‘a continent for the taking’? * Alexactus T.Kaure is a Namibian freelance writer and social critic.