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Diescho’s Dictum: The Problem of Namibia

Home Columns Diescho’s Dictum: The Problem of Namibia

This is a difficult reading, and not for the faint-hearted. It was difficult to write. This is about us. All of us. Even you and me. This is about Namibia, our country, our home, our Heimat. In Namibia, the Land of the Brave, there are as many problems, perhaps as many as there are languages, or groups, or interests, entities or organizations and even individuals. Any country, let alone a young country, does not find it easy to figure out what the real problems are and how to prioritise strategies to tackle them. Here is a glimpse of what the reality is on the ground. Let us listen to these 16 Namibians as they talk freely about what they see. They are each describing what they see is the Number One Problem in the country.

The problem in Namibia is that we have lost our souls in the New World. Before Independence we used to look at things differently. We had communities, we shared everything, we had strong beliefs as a people and we cared for one another. So much has changed that we do not know any more who we are. Some of our leaders lie to us when our kings never lied. Some steal from us when our kings used to keep everything in safekeeping for the people. Who are we, huh, what are we? We consume what we do not produce and produce what we do not consume.

No. Our problem is the fact that we were colonized for so long. Blame it on colonialism, comrade. For more than one hundred years we were under colonial rule. Colonialism has done a number to us, a bad one, whether we like it or not. What do you expect? It will take a long time to rebuild a country that was ravaged by oppression and lack of freedom. Like Kwame Nkrumah said, ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and the rest will be added unto it’. He even said that ‘Africans must be left alone to manage or mismanage their affairs’.

The problem with Namibia is our imbalanced ethnic composition. One ethnic group is too big compared to the rest who have to negotiate their relevance in the affairs of the nation. Let us face it, a leader can win an election by capturing votes of the largest ethnic group and the rest will toe the line. That is the fact. You can roll your eyes all the way to the back of your head, but that is what it is.

The problem in this country is that we do not have one common language, and it is therefore very difficult to develop the same understanding of what it is that we want. How many languages do we have? No one knows. And these languages do not communicate the same things when we speak, never mind when we speak in English after we think in our own languages, translate our thoughts into Afrikaans, then say our thoughts in the English we speak here. A lot gets lost in translation and we then pretend to say what the words mean. And we are even indifferent to one another. Even if we try to listen, we hear fokol! We only want to be heard, never to hear.

Our real problem is the fact that what we call and celebrate as Namibia, or One Namibia One Nation for that matter, is an artificial creation of colonial history. If it was not for the English, and the Germans and the Portuguese, we would not be one country with some borders we never created. We ought to be who we were as nations—Kwanyamas, Ndongas, Kavangos, Hereros or even smaller entities for that matter! Now you want us to think like one people, Jesses! Never! That is why it is not working. We speak One Namibia One Nation stuff when we are in power and eating, the moment we are hungry we go home—where? Many of us are Angolans literally, or even Batswana, or South Africans….Jesses!

The problem we are sitting with is the fact that this country is too big, too large for the size of the population in it. We are two-thirds the size of the entire Republic of South Africa with its population of 52 million people, we are bigger than Nigeria with its 170 million citizens, we are three or four European countries combined. How do we develop this vast piece of land? Yet we are so scared of so-called foreigners who could come in and help develop this land for the future generations.

Don’t you think the real problem is that we have too many foreigners who either own the biggest chunks of our economy or who want to live here? I don’t want to say much about the Chinese with their fon-kongs. My friend in Tsumeb near Kombat has a sister who got a baby from a Chinese businessman. Guess what: the poor baby did not live long. And the people then said that the baby was a Chinese product and of low quality. That is the problem, my friends.

The problem with Namibia, comrades, is that the majority of us are black and our cultures are holding us back. There is something about us blacks when it comes to running nations: we do not know how to do it, and we have proved that we are incapable of running our affairs like the rest of modern civilised nations do. And don’t tell me that we need time to learn this. Like they say in one Afrikan proverb: it is in the nature of the crocodile not to help you to cross the river.

Yes yes yes, that’s why we need white people here. Without white people we would not go anywhere development-wise. This is the plain and painful truth about Afrika. White people keep the time, they respect the laws and institutions, they plan and maintain. We eat and celebrate. We fear sciences because we fear the truth. Look at Nigeria with how many millions of citizens, and Congo with all the God-given resources. Minus white people, minus change, minus development. This is very serious, vakwetu.

The most serious problem in our country is poverty. There are too many poor people and we are one of the most unequal societies in Afrika and the world, yet we do not have a leadership with a clear strategy to tackle this problem. Instead, our leaders dilly-dally by making false promises at times of election campaigns, and they come back five years later. Plus, many of our leaders are poor and they are there to eat. It is like asking the mice to guard the cheese. What do you expect?

You are almost there: the real problem is that some of our leaders are corrupt. You can count all the so-called presidential commissions that investigated corrupt practices. Money spent on the investigations, and all of these reports except the one that Dr Richard Kamwi oversaw on Health and Social Services never saw the light of day. Remember the Presidential Commissions into education in Caprivi, Fisheries, Boreholes in the north, Ostrich Farming, Stocks and Stocks, Development Brigades and many more? All of them are gathering dust somewhere. And the practices of self-enrichment continue unabated.

There are two major issues that are eating us up as a nation, and will finish us in no time. The gender equality stuff and the generational gap that we do not have a handle on. The women have heard of equality and they want it, the youth are restless. This Amupanda fellow and his chommies are here to stay. I don’t think that we even hear what they are saying! They are restless about change and we are terrified of change. We keep telling them about the liberation struggle and even ask them where they were during the liberation struggle. The majority of the voters in the next election were born after 1990. Still we bore them with our half-baked stories about the liberation struggle. It is really like asking them to apologise that they were not born yet.

Namibia’s biggest problem is the bad education and healthcare systems. Countries that are developed started at the bottom, with the future of their young, for in their hands is the nation’s destiny. What we have here is a gemors of an education system and a nonsense of a healthcare system, such that the people who design these systems do not have confidence in them. You go to the Roman Catholic Hospital and the Windhoek Mediclinic, who do you find lying there? Officials of state who avoid the facilities they create for others! That is our problem.

Our problem, my friends, is that we lack religious conviction that would monitor our thoughts and guide our steps and stops. Hence we are all self-righteous, the exiles feel the world owes them everything for ‘liberating’ the country just by being away from home. The inxiles feel they suffered at the hands of the makakunyas, the Koevoete, even though some of them were part of the oppression of their own to survive. Yet we all lie about where we were and there is no quality control about what we are saying. On top of that there is no strong moral or religious voice in the country. After Bishops Auala and Haushiku our church leaders are all under the spell of the game of politics. That is why we turn to Desmond Tutu for meaning. Now Bushiri, sadly, or the new crop of profiteering prophets.

You do not have to go too far, my friends. Namibia’s problem is a black problem across the world. It is called black inferiority complex which manifests itself more often than not in self-doubt, self-pity and self-hate. There are things that only black people do to one another that other races do not do because they start from the perspective of equality and they strive for the common good.

The main problem in Namibia is the lack of a development strategy and the fact that we focus on the wrong things, even borrow the wrong things from others. We like pomp and ceremony, smoke and mirror, we like titles but no real contextual strategies to take our country forward. Every minister of education for example wants to start from scratch with new things as if there was no ministry before. We like to show off how rich or powerful we are, and there is very little else. We even wear the most expensive watches on our wrists but never watch the watch to be punctual.

This means that our situation is NOT that simple, and one person, or one party or one tribe cannot have the holistic solution to our challenges. It is like the old story of a famous painter who painted a very big mural for all to enjoy. Yet all he got was criticism from everybody who cared to write on the sides of the mural how terrible the art work looked. He was so frustrated that one day he put besides the mural a few buckets of different colours of paint, a few brushes and a note: ‘Please use the paint and brush to improve what you do not like.’ That was the end of all criticism. The glass is much more than half-full-half-empty!