Charles Robert Darwin wrote in his Origin of Species that the one group within the human family that would adapt to change the best will be superior to the others. Hence, he has been described as a racist for generating an understanding that because white people adapt to change better and faster through ingenuity, creativity and chance/risk taking, they are superior to other races who go by untested beliefs and customs. It might be very helpful for us as a nation, now that we are not so young, to go back and try to answer the question how we adapted to change in the last 25 years.
In light of what we have learned and have become in the last 25 years, we must be in a position to see, know, discern, evaluate, appreciate and name the good things we have done so that we take these with us into the future, and leave behind us those things we now know we ought not to have done. Failure to do this is tantamount to celebrating an inability to chart a better future based on realities of today, or simply validate what has been said about us, namely that we are unable to adapt to change, and therefore remain in the rut of underdevelopment and blame others for it.
The starting point for fashioning an ideology 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 ideology would have started frontally in the creation of the new public service right at the beginning. The Government of the Republic noticed this gap ten years after independence and regrouped to establish the Namibia Institute of Public Administration and Management (NIPAM). The wisdom of the Namibian Government with this intervention is not fully appreciated by those who were not there and NIPAM is likely to suffer the fate of other management development institutions in Afrika if there is no ideology to buttress the development of managing emotions of and resources for the Namibian nation.
Given our historical background, more efforts ought to have gone into the definition and characterisation of our new state and all those living in it. We did not do enough to fashion an ideology for the Namibian state that would filter through all its spheres and inform and shape the attitudes we bear when serving the Namibian citizens now and in the future. We were too excited with the celebration of political independence and the dance of self-congratulations that followed thereafter. We are still in that mood right now. We are still celebrating independence at the expense of the future. There is no coherent national ideology as yet.
Several visions of European entities which admittedly led to terrible endings, were however of such a nature that the member of these groups were given a sense of who they were in relation to their own members and the outside world. The best nation building model today is the story of the United States of America. The American story of fashioning a new system of government that the human race has never seen before, coded in the American dream that it is self-evident that all people are created equal and endowed with the Creator with inalienable rights, amongst them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the internalisation of such national self-definition that would make possible the arrival of a black man who never fought in any war and whose father was not an American citizen in the White House. This phenomenon is not possible in Namibia or any other existing nation on earth, because they have not defined themselves in such an inclusive manner.
The Chinese systems of governance derive their values from the internalised precepts in Chinese Philosophy and traditions, starting with the basic concept of the Mandate of Heaven, meaning that Heaven blesses the authority of a just ruler, but that the Heaven would be displeased with an unwise ruler, from whom the mandate to rule would then be retracted. The Chinese sage Lao Tsu, commonly known as Confucius, developed schools of thought along this paradigm, translating into a worldview that Chinese people hold, which is a system of moral, social, political, and quasi-religious interactions based upon (a) the Golden Rule ( that each Chinese person treats others as they would like to be treated, (b) the Yin and Yang of two opposing forces that are permanently in conflict with each other, leading to perpetual contradiction and change; (c), meritocracy that the best person be given the chance to do what they are best at for the benefit of all. All these precepts maintain the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven essential.
The story of modern Turkey that was fashioned along the idealism of its founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who in his messages to his people rendered them vigor from the fire of his soul such that their souls were rendered zealous and vigilant as an ever flowing torch towards the ideals of a new mankind. This invigorated the Turkish men and women to be neither too Islamic neither too European, but a new civilization. No wonder that Turkey is today the 6th strongest economy in Europe with an unapologetic yet forward-looking foreign policy especially towards Afrika.
Cuba has been a besieged nation by the all-powerful neighbor the USA for over 40 years. Yet that island nation continued in the midst of poverty to hold its head high and offer the world a different model of being a nation where race and wealth do not define the relevance and character of the person in general and in public service in particular.
With slavery in its history, Castro’s Cuba declared war on racism when on 8 April 1961 the new leader pronounced himself on this very vexing subject matter: “[The] just laws of the Revolution ended unemployment, put an end to villages without hospitals and schools, enacted laws which ended discrimination, control by monopolies, humiliation, and the suffering of the people…’ Hence Cuba is the biggest exporter of medical practitioners in the world. We in Namibia can see from the personality traits of the Namibians who received their education in Cuba that they uphold different standards of being in the public service. In the main they are more grateful and graceful and not too eager to do things to be rich. One such example was the late Abraham Iiyambo, a standard bearer of public service.
Then there is the success story of a tiny city-state Singapore, which with the leadership of Lee Kwan Yew was transformed from a British colonial enclave to an n Asian Tiger. Lee Kwan Yew inherited a debilitated society ravaged with racial inequalities and potential strife. He set out on an Invest in People Agenda by leveling the playing field first by addressing access to education, employment, and social integration as key planks in building a cohesive nation composed of multiple races, ethnicities, and religions. He committed his government to meritocracy as the way toward a cohesive society. With his “Does It Work? Economic Development Plan he was able to discontinue what was not working and proceeded with what was working. He invested in infrastructure and national institutions, such as the Changi International Airport and the world’s largest container port to establishing the Biopolis and Fusionopolis parks, the research hubs at the National University of Singapore. In turn, Singapore maintained itself as a free port city while running one of the most highly successful publicly owned airlines in the world.
Homeownership soared and led to the stability of Singapore’s middle class through the sale of public housing to new families. Corruption was met head-on through a combination of tough penalties along with highly competitive salaries for the civil service. Government and corporate scholarships cemented a growing, well-educated middle class. As such even after his retirement, Lee was retained by subsequent governments as Minister for Mentoring.
The closest examples to us are the narratives of a post-apartheid South Africa and a post-genocide Rwanda. In spite of the most unfortunate shenanigans going on in the post-Mandela-Mbeki South Africa under a morally flawed political leadership, the foundations that were laid by Nelson Mandela will beckon the citizens of that country to regroup and get it right again. On 20 April 1964, before Mandela was sentenced to life plus five years, he laid down the self-definition for South Africa: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” This reference will always keep South Africa awake to the ideal of a desired South African state, and failures will always be assessed against Mandela’s ideology for his nation.
Then there is the evolving Rwanda, a nation that was devastated by one of the worst experience any society can have: the genocide of 1994 which brought the worst in human beings in manners that even the perpetrators cannot countenance. The New Rwanda found a narrative in its own old history that assists the leadership to beckon people to come together and realize that they are better than they thought at the time of the terrible mass killings. President Paul Kagame implored the Rwandese people to caste their eyes onto a story that caused them to return home to their own culture in order to rediscover their relationship with God. Hence they managed to find within themselves the wherewithal to rally around an old Kinyarwanda adage that teaches: ‘Imana Yirirwa ahandi ikarara mu Rwanda’ (God spends time everywhere else, but He comes to sleep in Rwanda).
The common thread amongst these dreamers is their commitment to something beyond their own personal self-interests and comfort. They saw something bigger and larger than themselves as the driving force behind their leadership and stewarding of national resources and donor money. Others followed them by virtue of their almost supernatural gifts of defining the new world as a desired future state for all to aspire to reach. They saw their leadership as fortuitous, not a right. Their leadership models are thus more durable and transportable to other situations. How have we done as a country on nation building and Public Service? We could have done better. We are still steeped in the past where we judge one another and give one another credit; even take it away, on the basis of the hostilities of the yesterday and yesteryear. Merit and ideas do not matter, or are sacrificed at the altar of expediency, career opportunism and blind loyalty to values that cannot be described positively. (To be continued)