OUR foreign policy is in a no-man’s land.
How do we define our foreign policy in the face of changing events in North Africa? Specifically, how should our policy priorities shift when events can lead to seismic changes in countries where our support for leaders has been blind and unequivocal?Ordinarily, such questions are not only important for observers, but also for policy-makers and ordinary citizens in a democracy. By definition, foreign policy is particular and its field of action goes beyond the national. As such, our foreign policy considerations, opaque as they may be, should respond and adapt on the basis of external events to which Namibia, as a small country, will have no control. Importantly, they should also be inspired by events which should then be analysed to effect and internalize the necessary changes. The Arab spring and the fall of the eccentric Muammar Gaddafi should therefore provide important lessons for a country that has chosen democracy as a way of political and public life. We should learn crucial lessons from the fall of the man dubbed the ‘mad dog of the middle-east’ and rethink our ‘revolutionary rhetoric’, which has become more reactionary than anything else in the face of global events and our democratic order. It remains however doubtful if certain values were (and would be) entrenched in the face of these changes. Our ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ is nothing more than reactionary and even plain silly because it is inconsistent with the democratic and constitutional order that we have chosen at independence. Thus, instead of anchoring of our foreign policy on the seemingly more enduring values of democracy, we still use the liberation struggle as an entry point for our foreign policy. Yet, policy-makers ought to be reminded that our liberation struggle was just a brief interlude in the history of this country. While liberation may have been important in forging our identity and particularly that of Swapo and its external relations, it was not an end in itself. The end was a free Namibia, created as a newly independent state at the end of the Cold War – a turning point where democracy became the only game in town. We as a result agreed, or were perhaps were constrained, to implement a democratic order. As a consequence, democracy and the values that underpin this process ought to be the guiding frameworks of our foreign policy. For liberation (with its toxic east-west contagion) to be the rallying cry and motto in everything we do has not only been anathema to crafting sound democratic values, but to see it as a critical building block in our foreign policy has meant that we have been consistently on the wrong side of history over the past twenty years. The oppressive and totalitarian regimes that have come to occupy a seat at our high table through praise rhetoric are out of touch with the aspirations of their own people and the direction and shape of world history. As such, we got it wrong in supporting the brutality and recklessness of Nigeria’s Sani Abacha in the 1990s. We got it wrong on Robert Mugabe in the face of a brutal crackdown on civilians and opposition parties. We have it wrong on being cozy with the totalitarian regime of North Korea. We got it wrong in dilly-dallying around Laurent Gbagbo of Côte d’Ivoire when he clearly no longer represented the legitimate democratic aspirations of the Ivorian people. As a small country with a still untested but functioning democratic process, we have been losing opportunities to frame democracy as an important value in our external relations and interactions with countries. The opportunistic and tiring usage of the liberation struggle and its rhetoric when engaging the west at political rallies or in the comfort of our offices makes us look pretty amateurish. Similarly, engaging in this liberation rhetoric when we engage the Mugabes, the Gaddafis and the Castros make us look pretty spineless with regard to our own functioning democratic and capitalist order. We should accept democracy as an important part of our political identity in our external relations. As such, we should also defend it as a way of life. This would mean that when civilians in other countries push for a democratic order, we should not act as if we don’t live in a democracy. We should also speak for those aspirations and call for restraint when communicating with our reckless friends. Failure to do so would result in the short-termism of supporting a falling Gaddafi regime in Libya while it’s embassy in Windhoek rallies behind freedom fighters destroying the dictator’s edifices in Tripoli’s Green Square. 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.
