Walvis Bay’s Twaloloka fire disaster is a perfect metaphor for the steaming heap of horse manure that we call Namibia.
While hundreds of people lost their belongings and homes to a massive fire on Sunday evening, Swapo was locked in a two-day introspection meeting that spilled into a third day to “respond effectively to the changing political dynamics and environment” after Hage Geingob received a from the electorate, including those from Walvis Bay who rejected him unequivocally.
Twaloloka, meaning we are tired, is a shack city where an army of unemployed and working poor Namibians live in the country’s economic heartbeat.
A 20-month-old boy died in the fire.
The conditions in Namibia’s ever-growing informal settlements are harsh.
Thousands are piled up in makeshift structures built with any type of material. Often wooden pallets.
Needless to say, these houses are as combustible as Namibia’s socio-economic situation.
After years of artificially inflating the price of urban land to make as much money as possible, municipalities have managed to grow the population of informal settlements on the outskirts of towns to the extent where almost half of Namibia’s population live on the periphery of society.
What do you do if you can’t afford the rent of the flats in town or the upmarket neighbourhoods? You move to the more affordable suburbs. What do you do if you can’t afford the in the suburbs around the central business district? You move to the .
Katutura! The place where we don’t want to live.
What do you do if you can’t afford a small house in Nama Lokasie, Shandumbala or Grysblok?
The poor have been moved further and further away from the CBD, from their workplaces and from where one can hustle to make some kind of living and even out of the where apartheid dumped them.
This elbowing out of the unwashed, undesirable masses has seen some serious human rights slips by this government.
These cities of makeshift housing, where people build wherever they can find a space with whatever they can find to build with, are not suitable for human habitation.
There aren’t proper roads, sewerage, telecommunications, water and electricity infrastructure, and getting emergency services there is a nightmare.
Remember in April 2018 when the bodies of Saima Thomas (32) and her son Lukas Shindinge (3) were swept away by the flood that also destroyed their shack? Her husband survived and could rescue their three-day-old son?
Remember how outraged we were and how we shouted at the politicians?
People leave rural areas to look for a better life in the urban centres so these makeshift cities of government inertia keep growing because municipalities have made land too expensive – even for the middle class.
Local authorities don’t exist any more to solve our issues or to make our lives more bearable. No, councillors now see who can get the biggest payoff from which contractor, and council employees are property moguls.
And while the elected representatives haggle over the price of their vote those living in shanty towns suffer a little more and get forgotten a little more and get taken for a just a little more.
Just last week the councillor of the Tobias Hainyeko constituency had to tell the governor of the Khomas region that the 65 toilets she reported were built in that constituency in fact … did not exist.
Christoph Likuwa dismissed Khomas governor Laura McLeod-Katjirua’s statement, that 65 toilets had been built at a cost of N$1,9 million in his constituency during the financial year.
Only two were built to show the funders nice nice.
Imagine what the Shack Dwellers Federation could do with almost N$2 million. Almost N$30 000 a toilet? Do they turn your shit into gold coins?
I wonder what happened to the money budgeted for the toilets, and I wonder how deeply asleep this governor is at the wheel.
They can’t even build shithouses.
Walvis Bay is not just the epicentre of Namibia’s Covid-19 pandemic. It has also become the centre of political resistance against Swapo and its kleptocratic reign.
As Hidipo Hamutenya once said, it’s cold outside Swapo. Walvis Bay has already started to feel the breeze. At the time of writing this Hage Geingob and his government have largely wiped their arses with the Twaloloka situation. Just as they’ve done with Walvis Bay’s Covid-19 situation by sending a bunch of junior no-names on a weekend jaunt.
The first appearance our mourner-in-chief made after the Twaloloka disaster was by dancing to the beat of Ndilimani singing his praises late Monday afternoon.
