‘Salaries Without Performance’ Confuses

THE letter of Flip van Vuuren (The Namibian 15 June 2012) is puzzling me. Let us go into some detail to clarify matters. What does the writer understand about ‘anonymous letters’?

Anonymity and pseudonyms, does he understand the difference? And does he understand the real meaning of ‘research’? Does he understand the saying that ‘Rome was not built in one day’?He came to SANUMARC [Sam Nujoma Marine and Coastal Resources Research Centre] in 2004; what does he know of the years before, of the ‘first and second’ problems of the new centre? And, what does he know of ‘journalistic freedom’? How does he understand xenophobia?Of course, if one wants to retaliate on allegations made against one, one has to state one’s name – to be a whistle-blower and stating one’s name gets one quickly into hot water. Using a pseudonym would therefore not do and writing an anonymous letter would prove useless and a waste of time.The letter of Van Vuuren is a mix of ‘this and that’ and of nothing profound – it seems to be a ‘hit-back-action’ only. Buildings standing empty are already a token of progress as a creeping child is a token of a human being growing to adolescence and adulthood.There is nothing wrong with empty buildings before they are filled with what has to fill them. And that is what the PVC [PRO Vice-Chancellor] achieved, of course with the active help of Van Vuuren. A child cannot reach the status of excellence before its time; and so it was with SANUMARC.How does the writer know the qualities of the PVC’s predecessors if he came to SANUMARC later, when Professor Osmund Mwandemele already reigned as director, as he stated? A teething child is not always a pleasing child and so are young institutions.Research is something very different from mass-production or an assembly line. Research must be quality work, done in a hurry to be able to attend to too many research projects – as seems to be the wish of the non-researcher Van Vuuren – will not lead to a certificate of excellence, and definitely not to the Nobel Prize!Our young nation – and the university is part of this young nation – at this stadium of its development needs also experts from the ‘outside’ and Van Vuuren is right on this point. But to look at our own researchers contemptuously is wrong, it even smells of ‘tribalism’.The way to go in Namibia is indeed ‘Namibian’; we have to inject in all Namibians the spirit of ‘give it all’, 24/7. And obviously, this ‘injection’ must come from the senior members of our society, much as it once was and as it forever has to be. If the senior members prefer to go the easy way by ‘importing’ the lack of skill, the lack of dedication and the lack of excellence that they had to grow and groom, than they and not the young researchers failed us.’Retired researcher’Henties Bay