Unmasking a Failed State

AFRICA is a continent that tends to reduce a good number of its people to haplessness. There is always that strong sense of the impossible. A sense of hopelessness created and sustained, mainly by African governments and their rulers.

And the question that ordinary Africans and concerned outsiders always ask is: “Why is it that the richest continent should have proportionally most of the poorest people in the world? Why should a 10-year old child go hungry in oil-rich Gabon, oil-rich Nigeria, oil-rich South Sudan, oil-rich Angola, diamond-rich Botswana, gold-rich SA, copper-rich Zambia or uranium-rich Namibia?”

I will pose that problem in the context of contemporary Namibia. Is Namibia a failed or becoming a failed state?

What I want to raise here today are some of the existential questions of our time – issues of poverty, inequality and lack of economic opportunities meant to improve the human condition and human security. People, especially the leaders and the emerging political and economic elite, keep on talking about Namibia as being a stable and a peaceful country.

It is stable, but is it peaceful? Or is this just another means of the dominant discourse meant to silence the masses in order for them to think in the direction that is in line with the economic interests of the elite?

In my view peace is not just the absence of war but must be extended to encompass the satisfaction of the most basic human needs such as food, access to clean drinking water, shelter, health and education, in short, the fulfilment of happiness. When the Basic Income Grant (BIG) project was mooted, and eventually implemented at Otjivero, one of its basic objectives was to address the issue of poverty in a very modest way. But there were divergent views on this idea.

Former President Hifikepunye Pohamba, for example, came out strongly against the BIG for unemployed Namibians and others to be made universal in the whole country. Pohamba made what should now become his most dishonourable statement since he became President of the country. “We cannot dish out money for free to people who do nothing.” He has forgotten the role of leadership.

But as Herbert Jauch pointed out in a recent article on “Poverty Eradication and the BIG” (The Namibian, 16 October 2015), “The BIG will certainly not lead to ‘laziness’ but it would be an important enabler to overcome poverty.”

Well, one of its main proponents, Zephania Kameeta, is now the minister of poverty reduction; hopefully the BIG will now see the light of day countrywide.

Leaders should not just live in the familiar but are supposed to provide direction and vision and these very people who have voted for them into power are in need of a direction. On his part, when he was President, Nujoma said Namibia was going to follow the ‘Swedish Model’.

We have seen nothing like that here. Instead, we have been travelling in a totally different direction – maybe we don’t even have a direction at all, Vision 2030 notwithstanding, which in my view is the opium of the masses.

It seems like the pre-independence promises of ‘milk and honey’ for all is now fading away for many. Instead, the ruling elite has been consolidating a pure class society. And no one besides the elite is benefiting from the country’s resources. The tenderpreneurs are paraded in this country as entrepreneurs.

Thus, contemporary Namibian society now revolves around legalised theft of public resources, corruption in higher places, money and power. It also revolves around symbolism, populist rhetoric rather than substance – a lot of talking and no action. We have failed in almost all the departments.

The mass housing scheme has come to a halt, Tipeeg has failed, land reform has been a total flop right from the word go and the last nail in the coffin of the land issue was when one intellectual idiot came up with the idea of 20 hectares for poor Namibians while the Tjekero Tweyas of this government can fence off close to 3 000 hectares of communal land.

In the meantime, the bewildered masses are wondering what has happened to their country. They are jobless, landless, homeless, poor and hungry.

Namibia is thus increasingly becoming a country that is unable to provide the basic necessities to the majority of its population. Those are the classic characteristics of a failed state – sociologically and economically speaking.

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