LAST week I received an invitation to participate in a public discussion about the pre-independence contract labour system organised by Labour Resource and Research Institute (LaRRI) and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung at the Thüringer Hof Hotel yesterday.
My participation in this intellectual debate is inconsequential. But what a bitter-sweet reminder it was for this son of a contract labourer, who once worked at the Thüringer Hof Hotel many moons ago, to reflect on Namibia’s pre-independent migrant workforce, the hardworking generation of all time!
This public discussion was based on Dr Kletus Likuwa’s research study with some of the surviving contract and farm labourers in order to explore their experiences under the colonial contract labour system.
The finding that former contract and farm labourers resoundingly viewed the pre-independence labour system as exploitative and suppressive shouldn’t come as a surprise. In fact, Namibia’s deepening poverty and continuing breakdown in family and cultural values can be attributed to this hated migrant labour system, which assigned (six to 18 months) work contracts to indigenous Namibian men from the tribal homelands to work in the mines, commercial farms and towns around the country.
Contract labourers were paid slave wages, not even in close proportion to the amount of work they performed. They had to endure the psychological hardship of leaving families behind in order to live at the workplaces in single-sex compounds. Employers treated them inhumanely without sick or vacation leave. So binding was the contract that contract labourers did not have a say in the termination of the contract.
Constitutionally, the advent of independence in 1990 might have dealt away with this pre-independence cruel contract labour system. Equally, the government and workers unions might have been pushing, like all well-intended efforts, for friendly workplace policies – such as labour dispute arbitration, better working conditions and better wages for lowly-paid sector employees, including contract/farm workers.
However, 24 years down the road of our freedom, mistreatment, exploitation, and suppression still persist for many farm workers throughout the country today. For most of the current farm employees and other low-paid workers nothing much has changed. Independence only means the defeat of colonialism but not less “exploitation and entrapment” under poor working conditions. Nor does it mean less poverty or economic freedom.
For most of them the only change is freedom of movement but the old contract labour system practices – such as poverty wages and poor working conditions – at large remain intact.
Now, do we have a contract/migrant labour system in an independent Namibia? If you ask me, the answer is yes, yes and yes! In reality, it is safe to say that today we still have a migrant labour system that operates almost like the old contract labour system, though the government is not sending out trucks to round up men from villages in every corner of our country. Nor is there an official law to back up this new migrant labour system.
The new migrant labour system, however, operates through an invisible hand. This new system is also very broad and sometimes difficult to pinpoint. It manifests itself in many different forms.
The modern migrant labour system is no longer only about workers from communal areas to commercial areas but also from villages to urban centres in mainly rural regions. Its resemblance is not only men but also women from rural areas migrating to live in shacks in urban areas in search of better livable opportunities. It is also about children migrating from their homes into our streets (working in the sense of begging for money/food) for their survival. It is also about men and women standing the whole day on our roads to be picked up for hourly odd jobs.
How then should we deal with this de facto new migrant labour system? Should we completely end the practice? Or should we transform it because it would be dire to completely end it as rural families depend on it?
Robust labour policies and constant monitoring of the implementation process in order to ensure that the contract workers are protected from exploitation are very important measures.
However, we also have to come up with measures to respond to the larger question of why people are migrating to the urban towns. The primary reason why people migrate as contract labourers is desperation for jobs to improve their socio-economic conditions. It is not because of the freedom of movement or choice. Freedom of movement makes it easy for them to migrate.
That has to do with our overall economic development agenda which is urban biased against the rural areas. Therefore, we need to be bold in developing and creating jobs in rural areas in order to reverse the effects of the contract/migrant labour system.
* Ndumba J Kamwanyah is a lecturer at Unam. His work examines the intersection between policy and governance.
