The world has a problem. Afrika has a problem. Namibia has a problem. The problem is: Anything goes. There is a past, there is some presence, but no future. There is universal consensus that there is a leadership vacuum everywhere, a deficit of leadership to redirect the lives of nations like it was in the days of the formation of the nation state—when men and women of ideas got into restless modes and began to think, reflect, cathect and dare to dream big in the name of their people and the bigger world.
Those days the art of leadership was a call to imagine life and the world and life to be different and better for the common man, common woman and common child. History teaches us that leaders who prevail and whose leadership models stand the test of times are those who are able to name the world they wish to see. Even in pre-biblical times, matters were foretold by prophets who named the desired state of relationships to the pleasure of God the Creator. Followers of these prophesies were expected to behave according to what was foretold and forewarned. ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.’
We human beings have a gift and a privilege that other creations in the Providence of God do not possess. It is language. We use language to name, articulate and enunciate the world we wish to see and leave behind for those who are yet to come. If we wish to see and bring about a different world from the one we live in, then we must name it and give it as best a description so that it can be pursued by all who live in proximity with one another and who cherish peace, stability and harmony.
For example, one of the biggest moments of democratic governance and the shaping of a new world order was embedded in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776, which intoned for the first time in the enlightened world what it meant to form, maintain and live in a Republic: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. It is the clarity of purpose and the appreciation of the human responsibility towards one another in governing a nation that continue to make America the Nation that it is, as the one that comes the closest to the ideal of a common place for all its legitimate members. This common place, a la Martin Luther King in 1963 is a place where each little child would be judged not by the colour of its skin, but by the contents of its character. In 1964 Nelson Mandela punctuated this American dream with an Afrikan codification when he told the Pretoria court before he was sentenced for life that he was working towards a democratic society wherein all lived in peace and harmony and have equal opportunity. In today’s Namibia this calls for equal participation of ordinary men and women in the manner in which they are governed, and the existence of a government that derives its legitimacy from the will of the people and which is there to regulate, not to control the lives of the people who create it with their sacred and secret votes. The clarity in these leaders’ enunciation of a desired future state was a consequence of the clarity with which they saw themselves in relation to their locations in life and in relation to other people. They struggled and came to terms with: who they were, where they came from, and their purpose in life, what they had to do with this purpose for the betterment of others. What they said was the outcome of their own belief systems which had been handed to them over generations.
Afrikans seem to limp from one disaster of governance to the other in the morass of failed states and bureaucratic systems that serve the political leaders at the expense of the common people. In spite of the rich interactions Afrikan leaders have had with other civilizations and systems, they seem unable to get out of the politics of the Big Man and un-internalised practices of pomp and ceremony that use up the meagre resources that are meant to uplift the poor and the marginalised. While the rest of the world is advancing to the stars, we Afrikans are successful when we merely survive. Afrika is lagging behind by 150 years and at the rate we are going, it will take us much longer than we once thought to catch with the rest of the human family that created better systems and institutions for human governance and systematic utilization of God-given resources. In Afrika, resources are for the leaders and rarely for the greater good of the greatest number of the people. And when this happens the leader takes personal credit for doing things (painfully) for the people and they are supposed to clap hands in gratitude. It would appear that the worldview we operate with is that of a falsehood: that we can get away with pretty much anything, or with nothing at all. On 6 March 1957 a West Afrikan British colony named the Gold Coast became Ghana, with a flag with a black star in the middle to signify that Afrika under black rule would be different for the majority of its inhabitants. In the next ten years, over 20 new nations were born across the Afrikan continent such that the then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan shocked the then white-ruled Southern Africa with what ought to have been a self-evident statement: The winds of change are blowing across the African continent. The veritable promise that accompanied the celebrations of self-rule was a better life for the people of Afrika in contradistinction with the lamentable lives they were subjected to under foreign (colonial) rule and before that the abusive patterns of authority and the exercises of traditional political power. Before colonization, Afrika suffered all sorts of what we would describe today as poverty: the lack of proper and durable shelter, lack of clean water, lack of energy for cooking and mobility, lack of good public roads, lack of stored food, lack of science-based healthcare, lack of formal education and pedagogy with which to prepare the young for uncertain futures, the weight of unscientific and boogeyman healing practices and a whole host of needs and wants.
On the one hand, with colonialism Afrikans lived under the heavy yoke of foreign rights-less administrative systems that treated them as non-persons. On the other hand, colonialism produced an unintended consequence, namely the arrival of modern technologies and modes of thinking and doing things faster. Then came a wave of political independentism—(not true independence as most new and ‘free countries in Afrika continued to rely heavily on their former colonial masters for subsistence and basic operations) albeit with a new language of freedom from oppression, yet no freedom to- be, to become, to do, to let and to create systems that can serve the people who have to make a living under them. The new political elites that take political power have become, invariably, the new problem hanging like a millstone around the necks of the expanding majorities of Afrikan citizens who matter only intermittently to the elites as voting cows and dancing cultural artifacts.
Volumes of books and treatises fill the shelves of libraries and bookshops to feed the anthropological curiosity of readers who wish to gain intellectual insights into the Afrikan conundrum of post-independence Afrika where there is change without change. Countless theories and consultant-speak works continue to be produced to tackle the Afrikan dilemma of going nowhere very slowly. Socio-political battles have been fought and continued to be waged, offering different promises and shades of promises to the Afrikan voters who matter only in elections without choice, but who are nowhere near the dinner tables in State Houses and/or homes of receivers of patronage as clients of predatory states which Jean-Francois Bayart described as the new curse on the soul of Afrika.
The time has now come to move beyond theory to propositions of what can be done, here and now. There is enough evidence before us to discern that our forebears wished to see a country wherein people lived in peace and harmony, and where the children felt loved and cared for. In other words we ought to name a new world such that the goal and attainment of political independence does not remain an end in itself, but a means to an end, namely a better Namibia that contributes to the betterment of Afrika and the world. The best way to thank our heroes and heroines of old, plus those men and women who, in one way or another, contributed to the background and evolution of the crafting of the Constitution of the Republic of Namibia is to set their spirit forward by contextualizing their dream, and pushing those dreams forward to the best of our abilities. It is against this background that the next 12 (twelve) dictums will be about the type of Namibia that is possible if we want to create the nation that our forebears: Samuel Maharero, Hendrik Witbooi, Mandume yaNdemufayo, Hosea Kutako, Hompa Mbambangandu, Fumu Ndara, Romanus Kampungu, Hompa Sitentu Mpasi, Koos Van Wyk, (Petisie), Reverends Auala, Gowaseb and Haushiku, Brendan Simbwaye, Peter Nanyemba, Anton Lubowski and others—had so ably dreamed about, yet never saw.
After 26 years of self-rule, the language of politics in Namibia ought to be different from that of the days of struggle when circumstances forced us to be ignorant about one another, when we could at best be indifferent, suspicious of one another, and even enemies. The next twelve dictums will contain an alternative national transformation plan – NAMIBIA’S NEW DEAL: A DEFINITION OF A NEW NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND MODALITIES OF GOVERNING NAMIBIA AS A REPUBLIC.