Finally, we answered that generational call, as we are about to swear in our fifth president, who happens to be first female president of country. Netumbo Ndemupelila Nandi-Ndaitwah is passionate about ethical leadership and service delivery as well as a staunch advocate for youth empowerment. Namibia and Namibians can be assured of the highest standard of ethical, considerate and accommodative leadership in NNN. She has a calm demeanour and a sense of deep listening. The description of the late Founding President Sam Nujoma as steering away from arguments and more towards calculative nature by Ambassador Tuliameni Kalomoh befits Nandi-Ndaitwah in all aspects. 

She is religiously truthful and a stern diplomatic pragmatist. She was born in Onamutai in the Oshana region as a daughter of a pastor. Her interest in politics was ignited by Mzee Kaukungwa’s engagement in political discourse under a tree in her village. She joined Swapo in 1966, and was subsequently elected as the chairperson of the Swapo Youth League. 

Her involvement in politics increased her prosecution, resulting in her imprisonment in Grootfontein. She left the country for exile in 1974 until her return in 1989. She is married to Lieutenant-General Epafras ‘Denga’ (nom de guerre) Ndaitwah since 1983. The couple has three sons. The ascension of NNN to the presidency herald the entrance of the 1974 group. This also heralds the end of the Tanganyika Group – those from the Tanga Consultative Conference. Both Tuliameni Kalomoh and Martin Shali (both from the 74 group) regard this as the largest group of Namibians to join Swapo in exile. 

Shortly after the Shipanga rebellion, Swapo, the liberation movement, had a conference in Nampundwe in 1976 outside Lusaka, Zambia. At this conference, the incoming president NNN was elected to the central committee in absentia. This was the most successful, structured and visible era of Swapo. Scholars regard Nampundwe as the place where an element of ideology was injected into the Swapo movement. 

NNN’s presidency will need to have readable and recognisable structure and visible outlook. Her various deployments will be major asset as the president of Namibia. She inherits a country that has started a broad-daylight movement towards elitism, widening a gap of the haves and have nots as well as the high unemployment rate, corruption and and/or poor service delivery. Our politics and health system have been infiltrated by ‘the organised counter revolutionaries with selfish interest’ and schemers. Nandi-Ndaitwah has the daunting responsibility of taking the country out of the prolonged Age two that Thabo Mbeki spoke about at the 30th anniversary of the South African democracy. This will require unpopular decisions, unpopular to individual advancement, but beneficial to the long-term advancement of the collective and the country. 

Our challenges as a country require maturity and acute emotional intelligence. Hailing from a big family, Nandi-Ndaitwah is well-equipped to harness our diversity into rekindling that grand vision and expectations the country was birthed with. Her leadership should be one of hope and on what matters most – people. 

Her earnest understanding of our democratic ethos and deep empathy for Namibians from all walks of life will make her the steady hand, ready to make our resources work for us. NNN is good at drawing connections between issues where other people might miss them, leading to more holistic and sustainable solutions. Namibia needs bold leadership to unleash the structural change that will stop tinkering with the apartheid system we inherited, modified and adopted. This is evident by the structure of the economy almost hardly distinguishable from the extractive and exploitative one we inherited from the Pretoria regime. This is the background against which NNN assumes leadership of the Namibian nation, with an economy still recovering from a technical recession, followed by the impact of a global pandemic and now by the upending of the global rules-based order and globalised economy to one driven by singular nationalistic jingoist persuasions in the era of pro-fascist regimes of the west. 

Piecemeal attempts at empowering previously disadvantaged Namibians have led to the entrenchment of a patronage system, which has increased the cost of doing business and opened the door to systemic corruption at every level of governance and administration. Some might even say that corruption has succeeded at decentralisation, where the decentralisation policy failed. The country is characterised by failing State-owned enterprises, run by quasi-technocrats who fail to distinguish between pipedreams and vision to the detriment of the scarce resources. Party unity has also been tried and left frayed, as it often happens during leadership contestation, with ugly and unbecoming reactionary de-campaigning based on ageism and sexism the order of the day. It is, thus, heartening to hear indications that the president-elect plans to extensively downsize government to narrow its focus on key areas of services and functionality. This ought to endear her well to the electorate, who gave her a decisive mandate to act decisively in addressing wastage in government and directing all resourcing towards improving access to and quality of services, instead of making political accommodations to please the ruling political and business class. The foregoing can only be countered by the new president if she dismantles all vestiges of any self-serving patronage network and mobilise all State instruments into the service of undoing structural inequalities and creating the conditions necessary for the self-actualisation of every Namibian. The only way NNN will reward the trust and confidence the electorate has placed in her is to boldly simplify governance and to do first things first – first being service to the Namibian nation as she “surrenders myself to the nation” as she recently stated. 

*Joshua Razikua Kaumbi is a holder of a BA in Political Science and Sociology (Unam), LLB (Stellenbosch) and an admitted legal practitioner. His opinions are expressed in his capacity as a Namibian by birth.