Landless People’s Movement leader Bernadus Swartbooi has levelled serious accusations of failure against Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, demanding her immediate resignation, if she has any sense of dignity.
Swartbooi holds the view that Kuugongelwa-Amadhila’s meteoric political rise was built on successive failures.
It is also Swartbooi’s view that Kuugongelwa-Amadhila cannot relate to the plight of ordinary Namibians and she was handed everything on a silver platter.
“It is safe to say that Saara Amadhila never suffered unemployment and obtained everything on a silver platter, as a high-level government employee,” Swartbooi said at a press conference yesterday.
“This life of extraordinary privilege and her dramatic rise from rags to riches, made her cold, robotic, unable to politically appreciate the dynamics of leadership and social relations.”
The presser follows recent remarks by Kuugongelwa-Amadhila who said service delivery was decaying in regions led by LPM.
Questions sent to the PM yesterday yielded no response before going to print.
LPM governs the two southern [Hardap and //Kharas] regional councils and most local authorities in those regions.
Her observation is informed by constant bickering among governors, regional councils and local authorities.
“//Kharas is the only region which has not hosted a state of the region address for the past two years and the governor has to create a different platform outside of the regional council to provide feedback to the nation… We cannot progress. Development dies, and that is exactly what is happening in these three regions [//Kharas, Hardap and Erongo], even though Erongo is improving now. These are the worst regions,” she was quoted as saying.
She was in //Kharas during the just-ended Swapo regional campaign trial.
The campaigns, which ran for almost two months, saw government officials and Cabinet ministers organise official activities running parallel with the intra-party campaign.
Swartbooi, a former //Kharas governor, did not take Kuugongelwa-Amadhila’s comments lightly.
“Under Saara of Omusati, the division of the national cake became treacherously favouring of the northern part of the country. The criteria for the division of the cake became one where the population numbers became the determining factor of who gets what, where and how much,” he charged.
“No question of productive assets, input to the gross national product (GNP) and the valid constitutional deployment of state resources to communities on the basis of historic injustices, were considered as levers of resource division.”
No equality
The lawyer-cum-politician accused Namibia’s longest serving finance minister (12 years) – of leading a retrogressive and elitist crusade of unfair distribution of public resources based on each region’s population.
“The fewer you were in population, the less you deserve, and conversely, the more you are, the more you should get from the national allocation,” he said.
He pointed to //Kharas, Erongo, Kunene, Hardap, Zambezi, Erongo, Omaheke, the two Kavango regions as classic examples of regions that have successively received peanuts from the State purse in terms of resource allocation.
“Kunene was dismally underdeveloped to ensure that UDF would be demised. The //Kharas and Erongo became mining and fishing pits for the elite consumption, and today one can see how //Kharas, Erongo, Hardap, Omaheke are dusty places, while roads have been tarred in Omusati even where it does not make economic sense,” he lamented.
This, he said, is despite the fact that those regions contribute more to the State revenue, when juxtaposed to their northern counterparts.
“Some statistics show that //Kharas, Erongo and Khomas, producing about 60-75% of the GDP only receive 14% of the state budget allocations… This is so despite Keetmanshoop paying more tax to the treasury than the entire four northern regions combined,” Swartbooi lamented.
The opposite, however, is true for the northern O regions [Omusati, Oshana, Oshikoto and Ohangwena], Swartbooi advanced.
“Regions such as Omusati, Oshana saw their allocation to local authorities and regional councils rise dramatically and development of infrastructure such as roads and housing and telecommunications took a sharp rise in the northern part of the country, at the complete expense of all other regions. Saara of Omustai led the way of the tribalisation of state finances,” he said in no uncertain terms.
Bubble
The 45-year-old was not done with the prime minister, adding that she is disconnected from reality in her “millionaire bubble”.
“She lives in an isolated and rich world of herself, a bubble of singular self, which often redefines and redesigns your essential being,” he said.
More so, the former deputy land reform minister charged that the erstwhile finance minister is in no position to pass judgement on LPM’s performance as a party leading the south.
This is so because, according to him, she has failed in every portfolio she was ever deployed in.