Monuments And Monumental Failures

A LIBERIAN man once invited me to join him for service at his church one Sunday.

Being new to the country (it was 2004 when I first arrived here) I seized the opportunity in the hope of meeting other Liberians and getting to know them better. I accepted the offer.The following day we met in downtown Monrovia.We greeted and then walked a few blocks down the main street until we reached the University of Liberia.Here a group of men, women and children, dressed in the typical colourful West African costumes, had gathered, ready for the service.They were all from the Monrovia Christian Church.The venue for the service was the University of Liberia’s auditorium.We sang, danced, prayed and made offerings and then departed to our respective homes.After the service my new friend thanked me for coming and once again asked me to join him the following Sunday.Which I did.But this time the service was to be held at one of the many beaches in Monrovia.It was days later when I started to reflect a bit about the meaning of a ‘church’.And then I recalled that many years ago, the Sunday service in my village used to be held under a tree.There was no building called a church, just as the Monrovia Christian Church doesn’t have a building called a church.So, in a sense ‘a church’, or even a classroom for that matter, is an idea.It is a social situation which brings people (believers) together in a process of interaction as they all talk to God.This process of talking to God can be achieved without elaborate monuments or buildings.And as one leading member of the Chicago School of Sociology, W.I.Thomas, once observed: “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”So it doesn’t matter whether you are sitting in an elaborate cathedral, a university auditorium or under a tree in my village to worship.The consequences are all the same.I cite this example by way of entry into the ongoing debate about the need for re-writing our Constitution, scrapping the Prime Minister post and creating a deputy presidency a la SA or USA.This debate has been stirred by Joe Diescho at various forums and has recently been carried further in an opinion piece by Alfredo Hengari in The Namibian.I’m not against reducing the size of Government, which all recognise as bloated and which is premised on economic considerations.We all know the historical reasons why the civil service is bloated, but there should be a concerted effort at reducing it gradually.But Diescho and Hengari aren’t talking about the size of Government; they are talking about its structural aspects.It’s like rearranging furniture in your house.So, suddenly the structures become paramount to the realisation of the democratic project in Namibia.How the creation of a vice presidency would contribute to this project is not clearly spelled out and is thus foggy.To call the suggestion by Diescho ‘controversial’ is, I think, a misuse of the English language.If our scholars want to sound a little bit controversial then they should call for the total scrapping of the presidency.At any rate, both Diescho and Hengari got thoroughly bogged down in formalistic and institutional mindsets.The point is that the King in Swaziland; the President in Namibia; the Sheikh in the Arab Emirates; the Prime Minister in England, are all heads of an entity called ‘the state’ and they thus perform the same functions, names and titles notwithstanding.In other words, for structural conditions to lead to change, a shared change in the definition of the situation has to be publicised, become public and acted upon first.Structures in and by themselves don’t change much.Ideas do.Namibia is inundated with institutions but is in short supply of ideas although one hears a lot of talk about the knowledge-based economy and society.We have a propensity for creating institutions without having defined the problem or the situation, as W.I.Thomas would put it.Yes, the study of various transitions to democracy, the appropriate models of democratic constitutions, institutional/structural designs are all important and legitimate topics for intellectual discourses but they are not everything.And although Namibia’s democracy is said to be ‘work in progress’ one can safely say it is on the road to full consolidation.But it is quite obvious that the democratic project has not moved concomitantly with an improvement in the lives of many of our citizens.We therefore have to go back to the market place of ideas and invoke some of the fundamental and enduring concepts of the last three centuries – ideas which even we ourselves embraced wholeheartedly during the dark days of our long and bitter struggle for independence and nationhood.These are justice, patriotism, equality, fraternity and respect for the other.I suggest here that we re-read some of the contributions by one of Namibia’s most respected academic and public intellectuals – Andre du Pisani.He has for many years now been grappling with the substantive aspects of democracy rather than its structural ones.Andre du Pisani is not alone, though.David Beetham, for example, argues that: “to define democracy simply in institutional terms is to elevate ends to means, to concentrate on the forms without the content, and to abandon any critical standpoint from which those institutional arrangements can be judged more or less democratic in their given context or manner of working.But to define democracy in terms of its basic principles enables us to recognise democracy at work beyond the formal level of government itself.”While on structures, the designers of the new State House might want to alter their plans somewhat in order to include a section for the vice president’s office and residence should this idea go through – although highly unlikely.A quick comparison between Africa’s new presidential democracies and the Arab Emirates, which do not claim to be democratic at all, shows that the citizens in the latter category have fared better in terms of welfare and wellbeing than citizens in the African democracies.The lesson is simple: it all depends on what kind of values and ideas the structures and monuments are imbued with.The rest is conjectural.I accepted the offer.The following day we met in downtown Monrovia.We greeted and then walked a few blocks down the main street until we reached the University of Liberia.Here a group of men, women and children, dressed in the typical colourful West African costumes, had gathered, ready for the service.They were all from the Monrovia Christian Church.The venue for the service was the University of Liberia’s auditorium.We sang, danced, prayed and made offerings and then departed to our respective homes.After the service my new friend thanked me for coming and once again asked me to join him the following Sunday.Which I did.But this time the service was to be held at one of the many beaches in Monrovia.It was days later when I started to reflect a bit about the meaning of a ‘church’.And then I recalled that many years ago, the Sunday service in my village used to be held under a tree.There was no building called a church, just as the Monrovia Christian Church doesn’t have a building called a church.So, in a sense ‘a church’, or even a classroom for that matter, is an idea.It is a social situation which brings people (believers) together in a process of interaction as they all talk to God.This process of talking to God can be achieved without elaborate monuments or buildings.And as one leading member of the Chicago School of Sociology, W.I.Thomas, once observed: “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”So it doesn’t matter whether you are sitting in an elaborate cathedral, a university auditorium or under a tree in my village to worship.The consequences are all the same.I cite this example by way of entry into the ongoing debate about the need for re-writing our Constitution, scrapping the Prime Minister post and creating a deputy presidency a la SA or USA.This debate has been stirred by Joe Diescho at various forums and has recently been carried further in an opinion piece by A
lfredo Hengari in The Namibian.I’m not against reducing the size of Government, which all recognise as bloated and which is premised on economic considerations.We all know the historical reasons why the civil service is bloated, but there should be a concerted effort at reducing it gradually.But Diescho and Hengari aren’t talking about the size of Government; they are talking about its structural aspects.It’s like rearranging furniture in your house.So, suddenly the structures become paramount to the realisation of the democratic project in Namibia.How the creation of a vice presidency would contribute to this project is not clearly spelled out and is thus foggy.To call the suggestion by Diescho ‘controversial’ is, I think, a misuse of the English language.If our scholars want to sound a little bit controversial then they should call for the total scrapping of the presidency.At any rate, both Diescho and Hengari got thoroughly bogged down in formalistic and institutional mindsets.The point is that the King in Swaziland; the President in Namibia; the Sheikh in the Arab Emirates; the Prime Minister in England, are all heads of an entity called ‘the state’ and they thus perform the same functions, names and titles notwithstanding.In other words, for structural conditions to lead to change, a shared change in the definition of the situation has to be publicised, become public and acted upon first.Structures in and by themselves don’t change much.Ideas do.Namibia is inundated with institutions but is in short supply of ideas although one hears a lot of talk about the knowledge-based economy and society.We have a propensity for creating institutions without having defined the problem or the situation, as W.I.Thomas would put it.Yes, the study of various transitions to democracy, the appropriate models of democratic constitutions, institutional/structural designs are all important and legitimate topics for intellectual discourses but they are not everything.And although Namibia’s democracy is said to be ‘work in progress’ one can safely say it is on the road to full consolidation.But it is quite obvious that the democratic project has not moved concomitantly with an improvement in the lives of many of our citizens.We therefore have to go back to the market place of ideas and invoke some of the fundamental and enduring concepts of the last three centuries – ideas which even we ourselves embraced wholeheartedly during the dark days of our long and bitter struggle for independence and nationhood.These are justice, patriotism, equality, fraternity and respect for the other.I suggest here that we re-read some of the contributions by one of Namibia’s most respected academic and public intellectuals – Andre du Pisani.He has for many years now been grappling with the substantive aspects of democracy rather than its structural ones.Andre du Pisani is not alone, though.David Beetham, for example, argues that: “to define democracy simply in institutional terms is to elevate ends to means, to concentrate on the forms without the content, and to abandon any critical standpoint from which those institutional arrangements can be judged more or less democratic in their given context or manner of working.But to define democracy in terms of its basic principles enables us to recognise democracy at work beyond the formal level of government itself.”While on structures, the designers of the new State House might want to alter their plans somewhat in order to include a section for the vice president’s office and residence should this idea go through – although highly unlikely.A quick comparison between Africa’s new presidential democracies and the Arab Emirates, which do not claim to be democratic at all, shows that the citizens in the latter category have fared better in terms of welfare and wellbeing than citizens in the African democracies.The lesson is simple: it all depends on what kind of values and ideas the structures and monuments are imbued with.The rest is conjectural.