Dr Ndumba J Kamwanyah
Dr Jill Brown
Namibia’s deeper cultural values of sharing may not be what comes to mind when resource distribution policies are crafted in our policy chambers, either at the State, national, or local level.
It turns out that, from our research, cultural values are important predictors of development. In 2022, we began looking at this connection. Resource distribution or the lack thereof matters because it determines a country’s level of development. Our research agenda is, “How do different communities in Namibia want to share and distribute resources if given a choice?”
In a world with a growing inequality, understanding how Namibians share and distribute resources is of importance. This is especially relevant for a country that is a frontrunner in income inequality, only second in the world to our neighbour, South Africa in 2019.
We all know this story too well, don’t we? We live in one of the most resource-rich countries in the world. But why is it that our fishery, diamonds, zinc, and uranium resources seem not to benefit all of us equally, but instead, gorging the pockets of mostly foreign companies with politically connected individuals among us?
A few months ago, 24 people in one family died of hunger in Kavango East, and in a WFP report this year, 14% of us are experiencing a food crisis as we read this. Additionally, the country’s 2021 Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) report places 43.3% (out of 2.5 million inhabitants) of the population into a multi-dimensionally poor box – based on simultaneous deprivations such as insufficient access to safe drinking water, education, health services, nutrition, and energy. In short, Namibia is the most disparate country in wealth distribution.
It is time we reckon that our policies on natural resource distribution so far have not yielded positive dividends for prosperity. We are spending too much putting out fires instead of fighting what is causing the fires. It is time to rethink distributive justice in this country, especially now with oil and green hydrogen being the new frontiers of our economic development.
Current resources distribution
As a nation, we have chosen to a social welfare support based on “need”. The Namibian of 8 September 2023, informed us in no uncertain terms that 618 000 Namibians are on social grants, 202 294 are surviving on old age grants, 356 756 are orphans and vulnerable children, 50 827 people are on disability grants, and 461 829 learners are on government feeding scheme.
Residually, the state is currently allocating resources and responding to the recipients by categorizing Namibians as deserving poor/needy, or not. In other words, to be eligible for public assistance, one must prove that you are a poor or needy person.
This formula leaves out a lot of us out of the equation. By implication, this approach views the poor/needy as a burden at best and lazy at worst. The need-driven social welfare approach is wed to its cousin, the free market merit-driven economy. In the merit-based system, the harder you work the more you deserve…seemingly. This is from the neoliberal textbook welfare approach that posits minimal state intervention. Meaning, that the State can only intervene when there is market failure to address the identified need/s.
However, neoliberal welfare or need-base-resource distribution is reactive and only cures symptoms while distancing the state from delivering inclusive development.
What this approach is doing is making it harder for black workers, especially young professionals, to save or build generational wealth. Instead, they are burdened with the responsibility of serving as social securities to their families, relatives, extended families, and communities as they share their salaries (a sense of obligation to the family and community) in a practice so well-known that it has its name, dubbed the “black tax”.
How communities want resources distributed
If we are going to move forward and think about wealth and justice, we need to reflect on indigenous social welfare practices that are intuitive to Namibians. In our research, we tell the story of four people who all helped a neighbour with chores. One worked four hours, another worked two hours and is poor, another worked two hours and is the oldest, and the last one also worked two hours.
Then, we tell them that the neighbour has money and/or chickens to distribute and ask them how the neighbour should do it. It is a task to understand the logic people use when distributing resources.
The interviews revealed three strategies; give to those in need the most; give to those who work the most or give to everyone equally.
In the Ohangwena region, we sampled 172 children and adults. 67% of the people chose to give to those who worked the most.
This was also found among Afrikaner and German samples in Swakopmund where 82% gave to the one who worked the hardest. This pattern, however, was not found in other parts of the country. In Kavango West, we sampled 183 people and 65% of people chose to give equally to all the people. In all communities, equality was the first or second strategy people chose as the way to distribute resources. Distributing resources to those in need was found in all communities but was the last choice for everyone.
What if we equally distributed resources?
We want to concur, with new evidence to support it, that the basic income grant (BIG) is a way to balance the inequality that is ravaging our country. BIG offers a culturally intuitive and Namibian solution. Even in the Ohangwena region, equality was the second strategy people chose with 25% of people wanting to give equally to all people.
The idea of a basic income is an indigenous belief, one that might feel counter to the post-colonial economic model that privileges selling labour for money and equating one’s production with one’s worth. But in fact, the BIG-driven developmental approach is grounded in the relational personhood of indigenous social welfare ethos. That is the ubuntu philosophy of collective responsibility, interdependence, solidarity, shared fate, and resource sharing for the community’s or society’s good.
The key lesson from our study is that people distribute resources differently when asked about the best way to do it. In Namibia, that points to the proposed BIG as a strategy intuitive and preferred by many Namibians. Scholars, policy practitioners, policymakers, and politicians pay greater attention. Namibians prefer a society that distributes its resources in a manner that benefits everybody not just a few individuals.
*Dr Ndumba J Kamwanyah is a scholar of public policy, and a lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Social Work at the University of Namibia. He studies the intersection between indigenous political and social welfare institutions, democracy and development.
*Dr Jill Brown is a Professor and Psychologist at Creighton University in the US. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in the north of Namibia from 1996-1999. She studies childcare and kinship around the world, and she is currently collaborating to study the cultural logic of sharing in Namibia.