There might be something redemptive to name and describe the distance we have traversed since independence in 1990. In tracing our steps we might acquire lessons that can assist us to be more discerning in determining our next steps and monitoring our stops. The two decades and a half we have been a free and independent nation must be long enough to offer us lessons from which to gauge our capacity and pace to mount the road ahead towards Vision 2030 and beyond. In old political sciences this intellectual exercise was called the art of counterfactuals. It is somewhat playful but interesting as it assists the person to play with alternative hypothetical scenarios in order to arrive at different and very interesting end points. Good scientists always engage in such exercises to test, verify and even disprove their own existing assumptions and conclusions. Counterfactuals could be futile in some instances such as when trying to imagine what life would have been like if we were not born, or what would have happened to us if our parents never met!
We are now of the age that we no longer have the luxury of shifting all the blame to those who administered us and our resources before. We ought to be mature enough now to know what we have done right, should not have done at all, or what we should have done differently so that we take the best of and with us into the future we desire and leave behind those things we know were not helpful. Let us heed the Greek philosopher Cicero’s teaching: ‘A life unexamined is a life not worth living’. Our own Afrikan mythologies are full of lessons about the need to learn from our immediate and past experiences so that we can become better parents, better grandparents and better custodians of our world and environment and customs through relationships with others. On the strength of our maturity, we can name our strengths and weaknesses and identify areas where we need to do better as we celebrate what, who and where we are today.
This exercise of regrouping is important in our charting a better future for our beloved nation. This is the only country we have and Afrika is our only permanent home. We can all agree that we have been doing pretty well on many fronts, especially with Graveyard Politics, that is, celebrating the past against the evidence that the past is not that great any more. Be it our Afrikan traditional patterns of authority and governance, be it our struggle politics of US versus THEM, be it our post-independence Animal Farm politics by which we celebrate ourselves rather than the cause for which so many have sacrificed so much in different ways, such that we are all economical with the truth, the past is not as glorious as we often claim. There is need for change along the lines of the teachings of Langenhoven: Soek in die verlede alles wat mooi en edel is, en bou daarop u toekoms. We have done well, but could do better, based on the realities of today.
Following are the areas where we can do a sober analysis of how far we have come, not to take away the accomplishments that are there, but to serve as a new compass. We are not doing well at all in the necessary areas of our national development, namely: Developing a National Consciousness, Education and Training, National Healthcare, Agriculture and Food Security, Safety and Security, National Youth Development, Succession Planning in National Leadership, Competitive Sports and Recreation, Manufacturing and Industrialization and International Relations in the New Age.
1. National Consciousness: People’s behaviour, assumptions and prejudices in national activities for national development are informed, influenced and monitored by a national consciousness which flows from clearly enunciated ideals and goals that in turn are inscribed on a national psyche. The starting point is the crucial project of nation-building. We have not even started, and if we have, it is not clear and the process has no champions. Namibia’s national consciousness should have started frontally in the creation of the new public service at independence. To its credit the Government of the Republic realized this ten years after independence and established the Namibia Institute of Public Administration and Management (NIPAM). NIPAM is the deliberate vehicle of the Namibian Government to steer the way the public sector is prepared and oiled to serve Namibia such that it remains the peaceful and stable country that it has become.
The unfortunate part is that not enough effort went into the definition and characterization of our new state and all those living in it. We did not do enough to fashion a new consciousness for the Namibian state that would filter through all its spheres and inform and shape the attitudes we bear towards one another when serving the Namibian citizens now and in the future. We got carried away with the celebration of political independence and the dance of self-congratulations that followed thereafter. We are still dancing that dance, years after independence at the expense of development and the future.
SOLUTION:
•Revitalize the My Namibia, My Country My Pride campaign with new vigour and championed by the highest office in the land. President Geingob’s metaphor of the Namibian House with no one outside and his unapologetic reassurance of Namibia’s Pan-Africanism are consonant with this campaign.
•There ought to be new school curricula articulating our values as a nation sandwiched between two powerful economies, Angola in the north and South Africa in the south, which are both unstable. It is incumbent upon Namibia, small though she is, to amplify and live out the great values for which she stands in her relationships with her neighbors and the world while Namibia still has a moral voice.
Locally there ought to be a forward looking national self-definition that would enable the nation to understand itself differently, and turn inward to find its own resourcefulness in terms of food, dress code, and conflict management. We cannot remain fossilized as political party members at the expense of national codes and symbols. Tate Sam Nujoma, by virtue of being the Father of the Nation should be above party politics and have the freedom to address any political party as a father.
National icons such as Tatekulu Ya Toivo, Tatekulu Shityuwete, Dr Theo-Ben Gurirab, Uncle Marco Hausiku, Auntie Libertine Amathila, Ntate Andrew Matjila, Dr Richard Kamwi, Dr Beatrice Sandelowsky, Prof. Mburumba Kerina, Dr Abisai Shejavali, Revs. Ngeno Nakamhela and Philip Strydom, Archbishop Nashenda, Mrs Maria Kapere, Dr Kaire Mbuende, Ambassador Nora Schimming-Chase and the likes ought to be part of this important process of spreading messages towards national cohesiveness. With this crusade, the President will be in a position to appoint governors in the regions in a manner that would make any competent Namibian feel at home and function anywhere.
The current way of appointing governors is on an ethnic basis and cannot propel the nation to our destination as One Namibia One Nation. More deliberate work is needed to orchestrate movement of citizens in efforts to make tribe and ethnicity blunt in the self-definition of people so that Namibia becomes a truly unitary state governed by constitutional principles and laws of the state.
2. Education and Training: No nation can develop without a coherent education system that is
informed by its past and monitored by the hierarchy of its values and aspirations. This is perhaps where we made the biggest mistake with our planning in the beginning. It would appear that at independence our central preoccupation was to get rid of everything and anything that looked like, smelled like and sounded like apartheid. In so doing we did not discern some good in the pre-1990 education to retain some of its good qualities, because there were good qualities, such as teacher discipline and that teaching was driven by a sense of duty vocation. Teachers were positive role models in society. Understandable through the rush was, we threw out the baby with the bath water.
For instance, there were certain elements in the Cape Education System that would have served as the foundation for our own futuristic formula. Secondly we did not care to learn from the education system of our neighbours Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe, which would have given us some semblance of O and A levels. Further, with this rush we killed the spirit of our teaching corps, most of whom were trained in Afrikaans, by simply cracking the whip and telling them that come tomorrow they were to teach in English. As a consequence, they developed an inferiority complex they did not have before and dreaded going to school. In all fairness, we ought to have phased out Afrikaans as we were phasing in English.
This process would have been accompanied by a serious investment in the teaching profession with great emphasis on the acquisition of the English language. That was not done. Coupled with that, the leaders who became the role models of the new language were terrible English speakers and that did more disservice to the only official language than good. Hence we in Namibia speak of the worst English in the Anglophone countries – worse than Angolans who take English at school and worse than Rwanda that adopted English as the official language after us.
This is so because Rwanda pays adequate attention to the acquisition of the new language amongst its leaders and citizens, especially those who are responsible for teaching and who are role models. Here we leave everything to chance instead of deliberately investing in the ability of our teachers and leaders as role models to possess the tools of trade, the means of international communication and the instrument of cross-border trade.
SOLUTION:
• Make education free and compulsory for all school-going citizens. Make idleness and loitering illegal throughout the country by placing all able-bodied people in facilities where they can learn a skill or a trade.
• Place the task of planning and administering the enterprise of education in the hands of the most educated and capable hands that care less about politics and more about the Namibian child.
• Reintroduce teacher training colleges in all the 13 plus one regions.
• Restart the screening of teacher students such that it is not a profession for those who fail as it was the practice with Bantu Education in its latter years. • The Namibian Government enters into serious bilateral agreements with English First Language countries to ‘donate’ lecturers at teachers training colleges for a number of years. One has reason to believe that if this is done well, Black America will be enthused to be part of a New Afrikan Renaissance.
There are so many African-Americans who would love to have an experience in assisting with development in a stable Afrikan country. All that the Namibian Government would do is provide them with accommodation and security for the few years they are in the country. In ten to fifteen years, Namibia would be boasting the best English competency on the Afrikan continent.
(To be continued)