Swapo and the paradox of plenty

THERE are lies, damned lies and statistics. That aphorism, attributed to the 19th century British Premier, Benjamin Disraeli, is frequently shown to be accurate in most cases. Particularly courtesy of politicians when they pontificate about their governments’ economic achievements.

Fisheries Minister, Abraham Iyambo, seems to be in this position. In what he terms a ‘self-review’, ‘Keeping the Swapo Party Elections Manifesto Promises’, Iyambo, who is the Chairman of the Party Think Tank, set out in that piece to outline his party achievements over the past five years. That in itself is a disingenuous thing to do because the ruling party has been at the helm of this country’s leadership with a comfortable majority in Parliament and its achievements or failures must therefore be judged over the entire 20 years span of our independence.In that ‘self-review’, Dr Iyambo addressed the following issues: preservation of peace, macro-economic policy issues, job creation and poverty alleviation, infrastructure, global financial crisis, education, gender equity and equality and finally, youth economic empowerment.Let us quickly tease out some of the claims by minister Iyambo before we present the true facts on the ground.Iyambo says the ruling party has achieved and in most respects, outperformed its own commitments. Thus according to him the ills of apartheid and subjugation have now successfully been addressed. And on the macro-economic front we are told that Namibia has performed well in terms of the agreed SADC convergence targets – whatever those targets are. I think our ‘neighbourhood economic role models’ should be Botswana or SA and not Malawi, Angola or DRC. Thus Namibian officials trumpeting official triumphalism by comparing their political and economic achievements to some of these other countries is misplaced.He also claims that the party has created thousands of seasonal and permanent jobs over the past five years through government infrastructure investment programmes. Many other jobs are also said to have been created in the mining sector (the mines have actually been laying off workers). In addition 1 000 jobs are said to have been created for the youth. On infrastructure, Namibia is said to be neck-and-neck with the UK and better than the USA. And on education the Minister can only say that it enjoys the largest budgetary allocation and then goes to mention the different educational programmes in place. What he fails to say on this is that most of these programmes are hardly implemented and that we are sending more learners onto the streets than to colleges of higher learning. I think that behind these cold statistics, by Iyambo, lie the shattered lives of thousands of urban and the rural Namibians. Mind you, 20 years on and there is no rural development policy to speak of. Recently a consultant was hired to draft a policy document on rural development which was presented at a meeting in Oshakati but this was found to be sub-standard although the consultant is getting a fat check of around N$380 000 of taxpayers’ money.The reality is that in areas such housing, health, education, job creation, land reform, and education the government has not been successful. We are now building more shacks than houses. Just visit the ‘other Windhoek’ developing on the outskirts of the capital. And the municipalities around the country have not been kind to the poor who are trying to have a roof over their heads. Health has been and continues to be a nightmare for government. The infrastructure we inherited is now falling apart. And here enters the Chinese construction companies, the government darlings, building sub-standard structures that are falling apart – look for example at the Katutura Magistrates Court. I don’t know which infrastructure Iyambo is referring to that is better than that of the USA and neck-and-neck with the UK. Is it the new State House or the dysfunctional northern railway-line? Education, despite the largest budgetary allocation, as Iyambo points out, has been a disaster because no one at management/policy level seems to know what the problems are – with more learners joini ng a large army of the unemployed and unemployable on our street corners. Without going into any statistics, unemployment remains a headache for this country despite the thousands of jobs Iyambo said have been created. Add to this problem is the high prices of basic commodities forcing some families to scavenge food from dustbins. And our pensioners survive on what amounts to a ‘petty-cash’ allowance. The fact of the matter is that government has failed to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of the majority. What we have instead is Black Elite Enrichment (BEE) plus ‘Chinese entitlement programmes’ through which many of the corrupt deals are conducted in the country. Once, an elderly American parishioner in Baltimore innocently said: ‘I know Africa is very rich in diamonds, gold and oil, but the people are very poor. Why are your governments so bad at managing that wealth?’ And Austin Onuoha, a human-rights activist from Nigeria, smiled and conceded, ‘You hit the nail right on the head.’ Namibia is in that privileged position of middle-income countries richly endowed with a variety of natural resources and a population of just less than two million and it is therefore rich by any standards. But behind this mask of surfeit lies a rather disturbing picture. Suffice to say that the country is still marked by an extremely uneven distribution of resources resulting in widespread poverty, hunger and destitution.It is therefore poignantly paradoxical that despite all the endowment of rich natural resources, the vast majority of our people continue to wallow in abject poverty and this is contrary to Iyambo’s claims that we have now addressed the ills of apartheid. We have not.But what are the problems? Three main reasons have been proffered for this paradox. First, it is suggested that greater resource abundance can lead an economy to shift away from competitive manufacturing sectors, which generate most of the externalities necessary for economic growth. Second, some economists give a political reason for this paradox: resource booms tend to put large amounts of resources in the hands of the state and thus create the incentives for political agents to engage in rent-seeking behaviour as opposed to productive activities that spur growth. Rent-seeking behaviour results from the complex interplay between politics and economics and leads to bribes and corruption in government circles.Third, it is suggested that resource-rich countries may grow more slowly because these countries are likely to live beyond their means. This is because natural resources industries, for their reliance on exhaustible factors of production, cannot expand at the same rate as other industries. Invariably, what the abundance of natural resources does is to make a country complacent and gives it a false sense of security and assuredness. But the recent global economic crisis (the crisis of capitalism) has shown that we are moving on a shaky ground – remember what happened to NamDeB this year.But does that mean that our problems are insurmountable? The only disturbing problem is that there appears to be a small group of people perched atop our decision-making echelon, who have monopolised the decision-making process in the country, and who, in spite of their obvious failures and shortcomings, have insulated themselves from good advice, especially if this advice has not come from their constituencies or is from those regarded as too critical. And with the ruling party recycling its politicians, don’t expect miracles to happen on this score. So the question to ask is why it is that a liberation movement which has been successful on the diplomatic front and on the battlefield, as Iyambo and others points out, has failed to bring about fundamental change on the economic and social fronts 20 years after independence? Writers as diverse as Archie Mafeje, Reginald Herbold Green and others who were interested in the fate of Namibia, argued that apartheid had made a mess of the country’s economy and that Namibia was a growth economy like Botswana and that after independence it would look like one of those oil-rich Arab Emirates. Even a perusal through the rich literature brought out by the then UN Institute for Namibia in Lusaka entertained those views. This was even the view of the liberation movement before independence. Things have turned out differently. What we are witnessing now is misplaced and skewed development priorities or what one commentator called the ‘criminal waste of money’ by the ruling elite. We are trapped in the politics of symbolism, long on symbols and short on substance – building all sorts of structures to celebrate our heroism because there are no economic success stories to celebrate. And many of our people will continue to languish in the marginal destitution called poverty for the foreseeable future. Thus issues of equity and equality which are the demands of social democratic politics are far from being realised. So the promises remain just that – promises.