If President Hage Geingob’s Harambee prosperity plan is to succeed, government would need to do something radically different from how we handled similar developmental programmes of the past.
When former president Hifikepunye Pohamba announced the Tipeeg project some years back, he also announced an ad hoc committee, which was to coordinate the activities of the programme.
Whether that committee ever met – let alone coordinated the said activities remains a national mystery. Tipeeg was in principle a great idea, but whether it yielded its intended fruits remains a matter of heated debate.
We, therefore, need a radical departure from the manner in which such is to be done. In East Africa, the Kenyan government has created a Vision Delivery Secretariat (VDS) for its Vision 2030 development plan.
The VDS provides strategic leadership and direction in the realisation of the Vision 2030 goals to ensure the timely implementation of the flagship projects. The secretariat is managed by a director-general leading a team of four directors and secretariat members, under the overall guidance of the Vision 2030 delivery board that plays a policy-making and advisory role.
The Kenyan example is worth considering – especially in implementing the Harambee Plan here at home. What we also need is a secretariat whose members’ sole preoccupation is to monitor implementation, challenges and other aspects related to Harambee.
In other words, these are officials who wake up every morning to do nothing else, but monitor the progress of Harambee and or identify obstacles and inform the relevant offices, including Cabinet, timeously.
There is no iota of doubt on just how brilliant a plan Harambee is – on paper at least. But it is the practical implementation of the plan that would not only retain the confidence of the masses in President Geingob’s administration, but also unshackle us from the strangehold of poverty and underdevelopment.
The National Planning Commission has often been shouldered with the task, such as monitoring progress of new developmental plans, but perhaps they are overwhelmed with piles of other duties that they often seem to lose track of such responsibility.
We cannot afford to go the same way with Harambee. The broad criteria that we need to use for identifying successes of Harambee will be to implement observable development achievements and outcomes that are sustainable and that offer the potential for scaling up. For this, we need a fulltime monitoring body.
Achieving shared growth in post-stabilisation Mozambique, Tanzania’s successful transformation to an open market economy, Uganda’s decades of strong growth and Botswana’s sustained economic progress through prudent macro-economic management, institutional development, and good governance, were all a result of better coordination of developmental plans.
Cabinet ministers need to provide the President with weekly updates on what Harambee activities their ministries – or agencies under their ministries – have carried out the previous week.
In this way, bottlenecks would be detected and addressed timeously. Harambee should not remain a rallying call for naught. It cannot be another opportunity for tenderpreneurs to rake in millions for no tangible work done to liberate Namibians from the yoke of destitution.
Our clarion call, therefore, is that government should approach Harambee differently and with a redoubled sense of commitment. If we want to be a different-looking society by 2019, we must do things differently.