Unity as Performance: The Centre Fails

The death of founding president Sam Nujoma marked more than the end of an era, it revealed the widening fault lines within Namibia’s ruling movement. Inside Swapo, a struggle simmering beneath the surface has become impossible to ignore: the tension between constitutional discipline and the seductive shortcuts of political convenience.

We saw this with Swapo’s sister liberation movement in neighboring South Africa. It started when a former president of both the African National Congress and South Africa was recalled before he finished his term of office, allegedly because the party did not want “two centres of power” and was not willing to have “a third term” for its president.

What really transpired was that Thabo Mbeki fired his deputy, Jacob Zuma, due to the alleged scandal of the arms deal.

He then appointed the first and only female deputy president of South Africa, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who served from 2005 to 2008 under Mbeki.

The idea was for her to succeed him as the president of the country while he could still hold the reins of power at the party level because he knew she couldn’t be nominated by the party. As a result, factions ensued and allegations of “a third term” and “ two centres of power” surfaced.

Then Mbeki was ousted and left to hang dry in the cold, and the rest is history.

The same scenario is now playing out again, an effort to rescue the party from what are being called ‘elements who infiltrated the movement,’ allegedly with the support of ‘white monopoly capital’.

In Namibia, we remember almost similar events in the ruling party when some alleged they felt they “were not wanted” and created what others called “ethnic entrepreneurship,” which is how the Rally for Democracy and Progress was born. Now the question facing the party is profound: will unity remain genuine, rooted in principle, or will it become a performance staged for public consumption while internal divisions fester?

LEGACY AT RISK

Namibia’s history is etched with the scars of tribal division, a wound Nujoma sought to heal in building a nation. He warned that strength lay not in slogans but in disciplined collective action. Today, however, whispers of favouritism, procedural shortcuts and political manipulation threaten to reduce this hard-won unity to a stage performance.

When political loyalty replaces principle, the movement that once symbolised liberation risks becoming its own undoing. Unity cannot survive as a show while internal factions quietly fracture the party from within.

EROSION OF AUTHORITY

Hypocrisy is the slow erosion of moral authority. Within Swapo leadership, some now cloak internal manipulation in the language of pragmatism, presenting fear, favouritism and division as clever leadership.

This is not a protest against the party or the system itself; it is a call to confront the hypocrisy within the elite who, from time to time, commodify the popular will. These forces threaten to reduce the movement’s historic unity to a staged performance, masking deep internal fractures with the illusion of cohesion.

Leadership built on distrust, manipulation of the system and using identity and tribal politics is no leadership at all. Those who exploit identity fractures and internal fear are not serving the nation. True leadership begins with integrity, even in the smallest communities, and it is measured by consistency, transparency and adherence to principle.

REMEMBERING EXILE

The liberation of Namibia was hard-won, whether in Angola, Zambia, Congo, Cuba or at home. These memories are reminders that:

Leadership is earned, not seized.

Unity is essential, not ornamental.

The republic was built on principle, not political theater.

To forget this legacy is to risk reducing Namibia’s revolutionary history to a mere backdrop for power plays. Money and fame cannot replace a genuine cause of the masses for which many sacrificed their lives.

The moment we allow money politics to take over, any wind can buy us off. Soon, the names of those who buy and rent luxury apartments in rich Windhoek suburbs like Ludwigsdorf and Luxury Hill will be prominent, while the names of true liberation struggle heroes – Moses Garoeb, Tobias Hainyeko and many others, including our village mothers and fathers – will feature nowhere except at Heroes Acre.

What will matter is the billions one owns from fish quotas and oil deals, and trips to Dubai or Qatar. The sweat and tears of the real struggling people will long be forgotten. Not on our watch!

BATTLE WITHIN SWAPO

The current internal struggle is about far more than personalities, it is about the soul of the party itself. Key questions arise:

Will the constitution be respected, or bent to justify expediency?

Will principled dissent be treated as a threat, or as the moral compass and barometer?

Veterans of the liberation struggle cautioned that bending the rules for short-term gain destroys long-term trust. Yet today, principled voices are recast as enemies, and internal dissent is punished, while the language of convenience dominates.

This is the quiet crisis of credibility and legitimacy: the party risks undermining the very foundation it was built upon.

The ruling party’s upcoming extraordinary congress is presented as a ceremonial consolidation behind leadership. But public displays cannot conceal internal tensions. Unity engineered through shortcuts, fear or manipulation is not true unity, it is an illusion.

If the party’s leadership cannot demonstrate integrity within its own ranks, how can it demand national trust?

Namibia’s dilemma is not unique. Across Africa, liberation movements face similar crossroads, renewal or decay, accountability or complacency, integrity or factionalism. Some survive by reaffirming principles; others collapsed under opportunism. The Swapo leadership stands at the same decisive juncture.

Nujoma’s generation fought to ensure Namibians would be ‘masters of this vast land’. Today, his words serve as a mirror for the current generation.

The postponed extraordinary congress is a moral test. Leadership must be earned through transparency, consistency and adherence to the rules that bind the nation. Power may be inherited, but credibility and legitimacy cannot.

Swapo leaders stand at a crossroads: one path preserves Namibia’s hard-won democracy, the other reduces it to a ritual of slogans, fear and staged performances. The future of the party and the nation depends on the choice made today.

– Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of our employers or this newspaper but are solely our personal views as citizens and pan-Africanists.

– Paul Shipale is a former senior special assistant to the late Sam Nujoma. He writes in his personal capacity.

– Additional input by Folito Gaspar

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