NKURENKURU - President Hage Geingob says while balance is important when selecting ministers and other high-ranking officials such as diplomats, the country has no quota system to dictate how each tribe must be represented in such appointments.
In any event, he added, having such a system would return the country to the divisive Bantustans era, during which black enclaves, with limited degree of self-government were developed as a way to keep Namibians apart from each other.
Therefore, President Geingob – while addressing a town hall meeting at Nkurenkuru on Thursday last week – said people should stop counting and comparing the numbers of ministers and ambassadors from each tribe as this only perpetuates baseless allegations of exclusion without application of facts.
“Of course, definitely somehow balance should be there but don’t demand that ‘we are so many and we want so many ambassadors and so many ministers’ because some people who have their problems are instigating others because they failed,” said Geingob, to claims that people from Kavango West Region were not adequately represented in the highest echelons of government.
“When we are successful we say ‘I did this’, [but] the moment there’s trouble or failure then we speak French and say ‘we the Kavango’s are left out, we are bound to have so many ministers, we are bound to be ambassadors’. We don’t have a Bantustan thing to say how many Bantus are here, how many are you. We have passed that stage,” said the Head of State.
Residents also bombarded the presidential entourage on why Kavango West – created in 2013 - does not receive enough financial backing from government to effect development required to bring the region on par with others.
Said to be the most rural region in the country, Kavango West says it does not receive a budget for more feeder roads and is littered with incomplete projects that are idle due to budgets not being availed for their completion.
“When Kavango was split, I was asking why is it being done, why? Is it a tribal thing or what is it? No one gave me an answer but later on somebody confirmed it was to get development in the west and so on, which has been dominated by the eastern Kavango. Good idea maybe but because of that now you say you must get everything in about six years,” he said.
“We are being instigated by some people who have the loopholes. I know some people who used to say ‘I, I, I’ when they were successful and when they are failing it is when they become ‘we, we the so and so group we are left out’. We start to count how many ministers, how many executive directors [from our tribes]. Yes, it should be balanced but not on demands,” he noted.