Swartbooi Copies Muyongo

It is strange that opposition lawmaker Bernadus Swartbooi is taking a page out of the book of Caprivi secessionist Mishake Muyongo, who is now living out his twilight years in exile in Denmark.

After a couple of decades of doing the bidding of Swapo – as the best thing that could have happened to Namibia, Swartbooi is now behaving like someone suffering from acute amnesia to the point of promoting a breakaway of tribal origins through violent insurrection – a “shooting war” with “guns”.

At one point, The Namibian criticised Swartbooi for playing up the Neckartal Dam and some infrastructure projects, which were clearly used to placate southern communities, who he now says are being marginalised.

While marginalisation is taking place, Swartbooi is opportunistically misappropriating a genuine issue for power hunger.

The majority of Namibians are terribly poor.

What people like Swartbooi fail to tell the masses is that a few elites, their relatives, friends and business cronies have been enriching themselves by misappropriating public resources such as farmland, fishing quotas and mineral licences.

Swartbooi seems to have made an abrupt U-turn only after being pushed off the Swapo-led government’s gravy train.
Instigating an insurrection might gain him an exile ticket as it did for Muyongo. But we plead with him not to mislead the masses and abandon them to suffer the same fate as Muyongo’s followers.

Swartbooi should rather support the advocacy of institutions like The Namibian in pushing for the equitable distribution of public resources and demanding good governance in Namibia instead of hoping that the racist and obnoxious Donald Trump will place him in the same privileged class as white Afrikaners when it comes to asylum.

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