Brain Xamseb
Recently, the local media scene has been abuzz with criticism and condemnation of President Hage Geingob’s international and regional missions, which some commentators described as a waste of financial resources not adding any value to the President’s governance mandate of staying at home and addressing pressing socio-economic challenges.
They claimed that the President’s missions abroad are joyrides disguised as investment promotion missions which have not yielded any returns to date, and that in any case, investment promotion missions are best left to technical institutions such as the Namibia Investment Promotion and Development Board (NIPDB).
As is usually the case in Namibia, many of our compatriots, including youths, have unquestioningly bought into this hyperbole reasoning and condemnation of the President’s missions as “a waste of government finances.” They believe because “it is in the newspaper”, which has skilfully or yet defiantly used the power of imagery to provide a sketch of the President’s travels for the year alone, without putting it into proper context.
On the same matter, UNAM economist Omu Kakujaha-Matundu was quoted as stating that if the President’s travel costs are paid for by the taxpayers, then “it is the most wasteful exercise of the Geingob administration, [which indicates that] Geingob’s administration cannot be trusted”. He went to the extent of saying, “Investors will come if they smell profits. If you can use technology to serve the same purpose, why travel all over the place? These investor feet-licking practices should stop”. Kakujaha-Matundu rounded off his tirade against the President by labelling him with the epithet of “traveller-in- chief”.
Indeed, it is a disappointingly sad day that some from Namibia’s academic fraternity, which are supposedly the beacon of academic excellence, are expressing themselves in uncouth and academically unsubstantiated street bar brawl-associated terms, which are devoid of empirical evidence or rigorous investigation. When a scholar starts to express unguarded, ill-placed and frustration-aggression complex type of utterings, it is evident that such a person is driven by emotions rather than logic.
Academics are strictly in the business of expressing impersonal opinions, based on evidence arrived at after rigorous scrutiny of the phenomenon at hand. Anything other than that becomes, as is the case of Kakujaha-Matundu, an ill-informed personal contexture, or a misplaced figment of one’s imagination.
Now, coming to the issue at hand, to understand the travel missions of the President, we need to refer to today’s global context of strong environmental, diplomatic, political, economic, security and social interdependencies among countries. And, specifically, to the multiple roles of the President as enshrined in the Constitution, which obliges him to give effect to all its commitments in concert with local and external actors.
In this context, investment promotion becomes but one of the functions of the President, and not the total sum cause for international and regional missions.
As the Commander-in-Chief of Namibia’s armed forces, the President cannot be idle at home when there is an armed insurgency in Mozambique or unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and simply say, ‘I am the Commander-in-Chief in Namibia, whatever is happening in Mozambique or the DRC has nothing to do with us in Namibia’.
In Namibia, we are all about Namibia for Namibians and Namibian solutions. Meaning, we live in complete autarky.
In today’s highly interdependent world, such reasoning will be termed as downright foolish, given that our existence is characterized by the cross-border movements of people, ideas and even the export of revolutions such as became evident during the Arab Spring Revolution.
In this case, the President is required, whether at the SADC or African Union (AU) level, or even bilaterally, to engage in diplomatic discourse with his fellow heads of State colleagues to address the Mozambique or DRC insurgency, to quickly nip it in the bud and prevent it’s cross-over into Namibia or even engulfing the entire region and continent.
To this end, President Geingob has since assuming office prioritised the deepening of Namibia’s diplomatic, political, security and commercial interests with other countries at bilateral level and in multilateral fora, including the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), SADC, AU, United Nations (UN), World Trade Organisation (WTO), UN Climate Change Conference, World Economic Forum (WEF) and others.
The President’s role is as the chief proponent for Namibia’s environmental well-being, specifically in the context of persistent droughts, which means that the President cannot claim that drought is only in Namibia, and that we have to find Namibian solutions among us as Namibians to solve it.
Drought is one of the direct consequents of climate change, which is a global phenomenon affecting all the countries of the world. Therefore, the President is required to participate in the UN Climate Change Conferences to seek a collective solution which will help Namibia experience less droughts.