When a country emerges from a war, covert or overt, an inevitable free-for-all occurs. To the victor the spoils, to those not close to the commanders or at the arse end of the result… only insults and oblivion.
But this celebration of victory doesn’t have to mean lawlessness, the promotion of the jobs/tenders/entitlements-for-comrades culture and the flaunting of their ill-begotten gains we see now in Namibia.
When those who have access to power plunder and pillage with the help of their beneficiaries and only they get unfathomably rich while the masses sit in shit by the roadside waiting for a handout, we know something is amiss.
This colonialism we blame for everything is still making the animals out of us that we fought against and, until recently, despised. But what we despised yesterday we seem to become tomorrow. We have this unquenchable quest to become like our former masters, the very people we mocked and jeered, at all costs rubbing the faces of those we consider less than ourselves in the mud.
It makes me wonder why we need these oligarchs.
Do we really need a middleman between a government agency responsible for infrastructure development and maintenance and the private company that builds roads?
Middleman for what?
How about government just go directly to the guy who manufactures the pills and the syringes and we cut out the PS’s friend who only adds to the price we pay at the end of the day? Why would we go to Rehoboth first if we are on our way from Windhoek to Groot Aub? Why? Kandishishi?
If we do that then no one will owe anyone anything before, during or after we take anyone to Brazil.
Let me paint you a picture. In Namibia over 60% of households cook without electricity. That’s 90% of rural homes. Half of Namibia’s households overall and over 75% of rural households take their daily shits behind a bush. Did you know that 13% of Namibia’s population over 15 years of age (18% in rural areas) have no formal education? Vegetables, milk, cheese and eggs and meat registered the highest annual inflation rates of 15, 14.6 and 12.6%, in that order. The cost of transport increased to 11.3% from 3.9% recorded a year earlier. I didn’t pull these stats out of my ass. This is what the Namibia Statistics Agency tells us.
The business of Namibia can therefore not be business…
We are too far behind in our promise to uplift our people for us to aggressively make a few millionaires.
Our housing backlog looks more and more insurmountable because we came to the party too late, because we did not plan for it efficiently, because we go about it clumsily. I guess to call the way we go about the mass housing project clumsy is to say fresh human faeces ‘has a slightly sharp smell’. We need around 100 000 houses. How many are NHE going to build this year and at what price hoeka weer?
It should not yet be our time to eat… It should be our time to sow.
What is the quota holder/exploration licence pedlar bringing to the party if he receives a fish concession or non-existent oil exploration licence from government which he immediately signs over to a Chinese company and cashes in?
What’s his Rolls Royce helping Namibia and Namibians whose fish he is giving to the Chinese for mahala? Was the whole idea of us getting these licences and concessions not to spur us on to learn how to do business in this industry?
Should we complain if businesses around the world see us as a bunch of shysters based on the dealings of our EPL smokkelaars?
And don’t give me that bullshit of they’ve worked hard for that shit…
How hard is it to move documents that entitle you to millions of dollars worth of fishing quota from one building to another?
Or is the hard work about the wining and the dining of the politicians?
And no, don’t bullshit me that country belongs to us either. Show me the receipt. It doesn’t belong to you even though you took the liberty to sell it off to the highest bidder. And it all started with a N$100 000 plate of food at our State house. And then there was the ill-fated abortion with the mixture of olive oil, lies, mud and hope in a little bottle. Where will it all end?
We shouldn’t allow the tenderpreneurs to bamboozle us to think this is the new normal.
It’s not the time to cash in. We should be building. We should construct our own strong foundations and we should cement a culture acquiring skills so we can actually build a house when we ‘win’ that mass housing tender.
