PRESIDENT Hifikepunye Pohamba this week informed UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that Namibia is still under a tight grip of poverty, unemployment and under-development.
Indeed, our country’s problems are synonymous with those of other developing countries in Africa and elsewhere.
Ban’s visit, the second such sojourn in 17 years by a UN secretary general, was to celebrate the achievements of one of the international community’s most successful stories.
But, as Pohamba pointed out, one of the challenges we face is our classification as a middle-income country, a tag that continues to hurt.
The classification cannot be further from the reality on the ground, which is mainly a result of socio-economic inequalities.
The gap between the rich and the poor remains wide, primarily due to the legacy of colonialism.
The apartheid regime’s segregation of Namibians on the basis of skin colour is to blame for the status quo.
Blacks were denied good education and good jobs, let alone the right to own the means of production.
The majority of Namibians remain landless, with large tracts of land still in the hands of those who were favoured by the previous system.
Namibia can therefore not be ranked as a middle-income nation while the legacy of apartheid remains evident.
If one looks at the Gini coefficient – the statistical measure of inequality – Namibia rates at 0.74 in a range of 0 to 1 – by far the most unequal society in the world in terms of wealth distribution.
True, our self-determination as a nation must be geared towards addressing such inequalities, but this will not be achieved at the click of a finger.
As a result of our current classification, the Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, as well as donor nations, are overlooking us because of our supposed economic wellbeing.
Logically, the income of a squatter in Nkurenkuru in Kavango, or a fisherman at Iivilivinzi in Zambezi, cannot be seen through the same lens as that of a resident of Ludwigsdorf or Pioneers Park.
The formula is a travesty and akin to comparing the residents of Harlem – a ghetto location in New York – to their affluent compatriots in Connecticut, Bethesda, Potomac or Maryland.
In layman’s language this is like comparing the weight of a mouse to that of an elephant. Even if the mouse undergoes miraculous DNA transformation it will take more than the science of DNA manipulation to match the physical presence of the elephant.
Two-thirds of our people either live in less developed rural areas or in corrugated iron shacks. And more tellingly, only 20 percent of our people have access to acceptable sanitation.
Yet, based on the wrong assumption as a middle-income nation, we have less need for aid and many development partners are absent.
This comedy of errors deprives the rural poor of services that benefit their counterparts in countries economically classified lower than us.
We are not trying to deny the fact Namibia has citizens who are well heeled, but it remains unfair to benchmark the net worth of all Namibians to that of the elite.
With this in mind, donors should not view so-called middle-income countries as homogenous groups because each country has specific developmental challenges.
And it is wrong that donors working on this calculation that does not give a true reflection of what is on the ground, should stop giving us aid that we desperately need as a developing country.
Aid should, in actual fact, be allocated based on our country’s development needs, including poverty and inequality caused by apartheid.