WE have learned enough from older Afrikan experiences with self-rule that there is a myriad of pitfalls that we can avoid if we continue to keep our eyes on the prize. Namibia has done very well thus far. One of the deadly sins that we in Afrika can easily commit is to fail to distinguish the State from the Government and the ruling party at any given point in time. It is most unfortunate that in Namibia, 24 years after independence, we are going backwards in our nation-building efforts. This is so because the majority of political party members, particularly of the ruling party today, cannot distinguish between the ruling party, the Government and the State. In their naïve, over-zealous faith in the party, and let us add political opportunism, they consider the party higher than the Government and higher than the State.
A STATE is a legal entity recognized under international law as it possesses the following qualifications: a permanent population; a defined geographic territory; a legally constituted government; and capacity to enter into relations with the other states. All the people, the roads, the fauna and flora, the infrastructure and the nation’s resources are part of the State. A GOVERNMENT is a group of people with authority and means to regulate the affairs of a community or country with a mandate to do so by the governed either through elections or by other rights in accordance with a particular society’s jurisdiction. A POLITICAL PARTY is an organization of people who share similar ideas and values they translate into aims and objectives to bind them and the basis on which they organize themselves to seek to influence public opinion and policy and through mobilization get their ‘best’ members elected to public office. This means a political party is not the government unless it has been given the tender to govern, in our case by winning an election, after which it constitutes the executive to execute the laws of the republic. The government inheres within the National Assembly and the National Council where members of the opposition are part. Strictly speaking therefore, Namibia does not have a Swapo Government: Namibia has the Namibian Government with Swapo as a majority shareholder by virtue of having won the majority of the votes in the last elections. In the days of struggle, Swapo represented Namibia and at no time did or will Namibia represent Swapo or any political party for that matter. This is so because Namibia (as a state) will always have a Government even after or without Swapo, but there can be no Swapo without Namibia.
Many of our citizens forget that the struggle for freedom and independence was not fought for a political party but for the whole country. It is opportunism and the politics of the belly that continue to corrupt the values of the spirit that inspired so many Namibians, most of them in their youth years to sacrifice everything to fight for freedom of us all, not just a few, and not for those who joined Swapo at quarter past twelve and are now shouting the loudest about how much they fought and died for this country! The best way to honour our heroes and sheroes is to be truthful to our own values and beliefs, monitored by the spirit of freedom for all and the hierarchy of our country’s national interests.
Our nation’s history instructs us to be selfless in our endeavours to serve others. Just in the last several months, President Hifikepunye Pohamba has travelled around the world and the country saying that he was leaving as president, and urging all to support his successor. This illustrious peaceful transfer of political power has never been seen on the Afrikan continent. This is what ought to become the Namibian way of doing politics, not the death trap known to characterize Afrikan politics. The deep message here is that Namibia’s national interests are above those of an individual or a political organization.
The world has seen many powerful political parties that came and disappeared, such as the Italian National Fascist Party under Prime Minister Benito Mussolini from 1922 until his ousting in 1943; the German Nazi Party under Chancellor Adolf Hitler who dictated the self-destructive direction of Germany from 1933 to 1945; Russia’s Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin in the 1920s and 1930s; and closer to us South Africa’s National Party under Daniel Malan and a series of diehard apartheid prime ministers from 1948 through 1989, to mention but a few. All these parties were extremely successful in colonizing the minds of their citizens that they believed that their parties were faultless. All of them fell, and after their shameful collapse the most loyal members went to the extent of denying that they were members ever, or that they even knew these parties were so bad! In fact, the people at the helm of these mighty parties and their followers never thought that their rulership and power would end. Interestingly if not comically, the last leader of the National Party in South Africa, Meneer Martinus Van Schalkwyk became a member of the African National Congress (ANC), the very organization that he dedicated his life to destroy!
The lesson is that it is all well and good, and part of a democratic culture for people to belong to political parties of their choice, but the state which the party serves is supreme. In our context, national symbols are far more important than any of the political party flags. If we do not internalize this altruism, we are likely to repeat the errors of many Afrikan countries that destroyed their countries because of loyalty to either individual political leaders or political parties. Political parties and political leaders, great and likable though they might be, come and go, but the state remains. Since independence, political leaders in Namibia have upheld this value. Swapo as the leading political organization in the history of the nation thus far, has been magnanimous in respecting the rights of other political parties, some of which were and are irritants in the body politic of the nation, to be frank. There was a time when it was Swapo that expressed frustration with the dismal conduct and performance of the opposition to the extent that the then Prime Minister, Hage Geingob, shared with the nation that opposition was necessary for a functioning democracy and if there was none, Swapo would create it! That was a very un-Afrikan way but indeed a very Namibian way of building a sustainable democracy.
Throughout the 24 years of self-rule, the Namibian leadership has, to all intents and purposes, articulated a dictum that we cannot afford to duplicate the Afrikan story that we are all too aware of and we stand a very good chance to build a more pleasant and more positive story in Afrika. We stand a perfect chance to do this while we are still so small a population, and a people who have no desire for war.
Having been Afrika’s last colony we have most certainly learned from the good and bad experiences in the countries where our leaders were during the difficult years when we were stateless. As the first and biggest success story in the history of the United Nations and by extension the marker of successful application of international law, the name ’Namibia’ carries with it an expectation in the world that Afrika is not the repository of Banana Republics! It must be said with gratefulness that those of us who had the privilege to travel around the world in the last 24 years, it was most humbling to receive the respect by others in the international community who held Namibia in very high esteem, thanks to the builders of our Republic. Again, this was not easy!
In the context of Afrika’s path to self-destruction and underdevelopment, we in Namibia have something unique and upon which we can build a country without the shame of what is described above. It is the first time in Afrika that a nation has experienced so much peace, stability and democratic freedoms which are necessary foundations for meaningful and sustainable development. As we about to have our sixth democratic Parliamentary and Presidential elections, one cannot help but be humbled by the peaceful transfer of power in this country unparalleled in Afrika and even beyond.
What we need now is an internalisation of the values of our system and to support it with a different mind-set from the way and indifferent mind-sets of yesterday. A few years ago, the former Prime Minister, Nahas Angula, urged us all to start a paradigm that is characterised by Business Unusual. Our development strategies can no longer be influenced by what we ourselves get out of the country and its resources, but by what we bring to the table to make this country work better for the benefit of all who live in and those who are to come after us. This paradigm shift is important because we have come where we are through assumptions that might not be the right ones to propel us forward. One of such assumptions is that we are opposed to one another instead of realizing that we are all pursuing the same goal of creating a Namibia that is good for all of us, and wherein there are no enemies but brothers and sisters who are one another’s keepers. In other words, it matters NOT what political party colours we wear for inside all of us is one people. Three Saturdays ago, Presidential candidate Hage Geingob urged the audience in Rundu to desist from disrupting other parties’ rallies or political campaigns during the preparations for the elections in November. This is the Namibian way of doing politics – in a climate of peace and without fear and intimidation. It is possible to create a positive story out of Afrika – a country that belongs to all who live in it, all races and language groups and cultures, including those who were not born here but who play by the rules of our State, coming together in our Zebra Style! The elections of this year must represent another milestone in the long march to our collective rendezvous with destiny as a nation at peace with itself, at peace with its neighbours and at peace with the rest of the human family