Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
Year in and year out since we achieved nationhood, that is for 17 years now, our political principals have never lost an opportunity to emphasise what has been in their eyes one of the greatest achievements of independence and freedom.
Time and again they have chorused the peace, stability and reconciliation that we have been able to enjoy as a nation. One would have thought this has been a case of self-adulation. Few of us have bothered to pause and ponder how real this peace is.
Peace allows other energies that might otherwise have been expended on peace-building efforts, to be applied to other gainful ventures. When there is peace in the country, everyone goes about her/his business of either loving, toiling and eking out a living for her/him and those close to her/him which ultimately is a plus for the whole country in one way or the other. Not only that, but it also allows the State to apply meagre resources where they are needed.
Please, mark my word, I am saying it allows and I am not saying that this necessarily happens. This means that a country may enjoy peace without their citizens being necessarily well off. Thus, countries that may be high on the Global Peace Index released recently by the Economist Intelligence Unit must be conscious of this fact.
The Land of the Brave is somewhere in the middle of this table at 64th place among 121 countries of the world. This accentuates the fact that our political principals have been engaging in more than an act of self-adulation.
However, having peace is one thing and what one does with it is another. We may pride ourselves as a country that has scored about 52 percent globally on peace. Certainly this is something that we can build on.
However, this is not an end in itself. In fact, the countries are ranked in terms of 24 indicators ranging from their military expenditures, relations with their neighbours and the level of respect for human rights. Ultimately, the best barometer of all these indicators is the level of well-being of its people and the respect for their rights. Less expenditure on the military is meaningless if the savings are not expeditiously applied to uplift the standard of living of the citizenry.
Conversely, more expenditure and better standards of living are meaningless in bondage. Thus, before we give our self a pat on the back for achieving the score we have on the Global Peace Index, we need to contextualize that scoring in terms of our ultimate missions measured in terms of our standards of living and human rights. However, we still need to give ourselves a little pat on the back that we are busy building a strong foundation for our ultimate mission.
However, the latest police excesses in breaking up what appears a peaceful protest by a section of our community is not contributing towards solidifying this foundation. However much the police’s spin doctors would try to convince us that it was pepper-gassing as opposed to tear-gassing, that is not the issue. The issue is whether the ex-fighters are duly engaged in a peaceful, legitimate and legal protest or not? If that is the case and this is happening without them infringing on the rights of other fellow citizens, they have a full constitutional right to free protest to register their case.
In this regard the police’s business is not to disperse the protesters but to oversee that the protest takes place without disturbance and danger to all involved, including the protesters themselves. The police do not only have a duty to ensure the safety of the protesters for as long as they decide to protest, but also that the protesters do not encroach on the property of others in a way that would disturb the normal run of business of others.
Period. That is and should be the brief of the police! Not to judge whether the protesters have a right to protest or not.
If next time around Namibia does not improve on its current ranking on the Global Peace Index, yes then the police would have been partially responsible. Not only that but they would also have contributed to taking us a notch back on our mission to solidify the foundation of our democracy and well-being.