Political Perspective

IN the wake of the current global recession and the continual scary headlines about bailouts and bankruptcies abroad, it would be difficult to believe that Namibia and its people can conceivably remain largely immune in the coming year.

In keeping with these international trends the country inevitably faces hard times ahead, and the more we can do earlier rather than later to minimise the attrition would seem to me to be a necessity right now.

ALEADY the signs are there, among others in the likely staff cutbacks at our diamond giant and subsidiaries, and this will probably be followed by further bad-news scenarios in 2009. Yet there are few indications that we are taking things seriously enough to start remedial action right now.
At this point, our Government and private sector should already be hard at work with planning for recession. But we appear to be largely unconcerned right now, with top ranks of Government on its usual December/January shutdown, and large sections of the private sector equally taking the luxury of a lengthy holiday break.
When a crisis is imminent, there is no real leader worth his or her salt, who would abandon their posts in the face of possible disaster.
Government should be relentless in its pursuit of ways and means to soften the blows that will undoubtedly rain down upon our economy. And these should entail taking a long, hard look at the continuous cycle of waste and indulgence on the part of Government itself, rather than trying to squeeze money out of a workforce and middle class that is already virtually taxed out of existence.
I’d personally like to see the President making a stand in an unequivocal way right now and taking measures to ‘cut the fat’ (to borrow an American expression) from government bureaucracy. First and foremost those wasteful and ceaseless trips abroad and S & Ts for civil servants, many of whom exploit these to the hilt, must go! I’d like to see the Auditor General, who is knowledgeable about the inner workings and finances of the various Ministries, to come up with a ten-point plan or some serious recommendations in this regard.
Equally, the private sector should be strategising and looking at ways to soften the impact of what may lie ahead and doing everything to the best of their ability to minimise retrenchments and loss of jobs in these times.
A company that is properly run and operated should not have to retrench its workers. This should be an absolute last step. And these are the issues which must be addressed sooner rather than later when, crudely speaking, the sh** has already hit the fan!
The employed of Namibia no less have an obligation to put shoulder to the wheel and stop the ceaseless squealing and complaining and almost total lack of work ethic, that makes our country’s workforce one of the most expensive and least productive around. While hundreds of thousands of workers in so-called first-world economies are losing their jobs on a daily basis, ours are still ‘sweating the small stuff’, so to speak.
Namibians also need to start extricating themselves from the credit dependency that is one of the major reasons that world is in the current dire economic state. Don’t spend what you don’t have, and you’ll find it easier to deal with hard times ahead, rather than face repossessions of houses and vehicles.
What we really shouldn’t be doing right now is resting on our laurels and being complacent. We should not be waiting for hard times to be upon us before we act, because by then it would be too late to stop the avalanche. The ‘we’ means the entire nation. Let us take nothing for granted as we look at ways and means to survive very tough times or risk substantially swelling the already bloated ranks of the unemployed in this country and then to cry foul.
We must learn to tighten our belts, and if Government does not once and for all lead by serious example, it is unlikely the nation is going to do so. We are in an election year, and President Pohamba’s recent agreement to a 24 per cent wage hike for top officials is already an indication that Swapo is prepared to placate the electorate in advance of the ballot. It would be a mistake that will come back to haunt us if we don’t tighten our belts.
We must all learn to do with less so that others might have more. And if we don’t act, and things go from bad to worse, we really cannot say we did not see it coming!