I LEAVE Paris every Thursday for two troubling days in the undulating Normandy where I teach a course on Europe to students in the flagship Master Grande École at the Rouen Business School.
Oddly, Normandy is also the retirement region and place of death of the founding president of Senegal, Léopold Sedar Senghor, who as anecdotes tell, threatened not to attend the first Council of Ministers of the Organisation of African Unity because it interfered with his annual holiday in Normandy.En route to Rouen on the comfy Intercités train, I always affirm the troubled African being by listening to the provocative Cameroonian artist, Petit-Pays, or the great Grand Kallé et l’African Jazz band whose hit song of the 1960s, Indépendance cha cha celebrates the first wave of independence in Africa – in particular Congo-Kinshasa as well as the figures who made independence possible. With the benefit of historical hindsight, Indépendance cha cha now generates tremendous contradictions, not only in the personal self, but also in how the African self turned out to be when compared to the European other from which the African-self sought to gain liberation. Whatever reasons we may evoke, no other human geography illustrates that spectacular failure better than Congo-Kinshasa. After 50 years of independence, the unfulfilled promise is still present in the grinding daily African life there.Rouen Business School, neatly located in the beautiful geography of Mont-Saint-Aignan is a top tier, well-resourced institution. Certainly, personal discovery in this seamless European space is likely to generate reflections and conundrums (at times anger) about Namibia after 21 years of independence. After all, in whatever space I find myself, be it at the University of Cape Town, la Sorbonne, Sweden, Bujumbura or the United States – as a political writer the weight of Namibia and Africa is an albatross around my neck. In light of these (often) difficult experiences and tensions, certain questions are likely to emerge: Who are we? Where are we? Are we any different or will things turn out the same as the Congo when we celebrate fifty years of independence? When you phrase questions in this manner, the elegant Sorbonne-educated political scientist, Achille Mbembe’s argument about us (Africa) being caught in a dialectic of insufficiency and underachievement finds meaningful traction. Looking at Namibia from the outside, it is a dialectic that does not escape our condition. We are insufficient and still laced with underachievement. For how long? It is a question that imposes itself with urgency.To think of these, implies that as a country, imbricated in the African condition, we ought to look at ourselves – not in terms of what we are from a political-economy perspective (we are losers in that sense), but in terms of what we ought to be (winners in a broad definition). Globalisation and a pragmatic vision of what it means to be modern and developed impose this logic. To reach that pragmatic level necessitates reason, honesty and not illusion when crafting a debate about the future of our country. Sadly the public space and leadership is not dominated by a reasoning critical mass, but more by immediacy and a mob-mentality whose objective is to take as much as possible from the state.The biggest missing link defining and perpetuating underachievement in Namibia is the absence of reason and honesty in public debate and policy. There is no uniformity about the scientific ingredients of a successful society. Since there is no such uniformity, the improvising and ad hoc republic has relegated reason to an arcane and sanctionable activity – moving from one blunder to the next.Every other day, we confirm the amateurism of the state, promoted and nurtured by the state itself. As a consequence, there is just no policy or administrative rigour and competency in our system. On the whole, competence is a marginal activity in the Republic of Namibia – reduced only to a few individuals and institutions. This amateurism explains why the President would appoint an individual whose qualifications are suspect to an institution that ought to epitomise integrity (the Electoral Commission of Namibia). This is not an isolated case, but we have institutionalised academic and intellectual fraud through the validation of dubiousness. Individuals in public life would indicate that they have degrees or qualifications without any mention of the institutions from which they obtained them or whether they are credible institutions.Competence and policy failure also explains why a minister would see it fit to want to travel with all the regional governors to a marginal conference in Cuba. Systemic incompetence also explains why State Owned Enterprises would have acting CEOs for long months and even years. It also explains why an accounting officer whose office made a double payment to an SOE would casually inform a parliamentary committee that the Minister spoke to her verbally about that grave error. Our insufficiency is also evident when we identify a problem in 2000 or earlier – the need for the economic empowerment of the majority – and only table legislation at the end of 2011 to this end.Looking at Namibia from a stressed, but still progressive European outside, and the shocking decisions we are making, it would be naive to say that we are on a difficult, but confident trajectory that would eventually result in a country where academics and students would seek perfection and refinement within their borders. Unlike Singapore that succeeded in 30 years, it will be a matter of gut to say that in the next decade we would have top tier world-class institutions of higher learning or would have halved the unemployment rate (currently at 51%). Our priorities show that we are not making the right investments to reach that stage of achievement.We had started the Namibian project well, with competence and urgency, just like many African countries. But we are not getting it right anymore because we have not created a sustainable state that acts with urgency to correct mistakes, or one that puts scientific reason at the heart of state action. Instead our republic thrives on senility and mistakes in office, and it has normalised the abnormal. As a result of these sorry, but embedded practices, our elite is now suspect, compromised and dubious, and we are losing a country in the process.* 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. He is currently a guest lecturer in European Studies at Rouen Business School, France.
