THIS week President Hifikepunye Pohamba appealed for the arrest of the proliferation of too many tribal and traditional authorities. By his own admission, President Pohamba said he is swimming in a sea of applications for new traditional authorities.
Like President Pohamba, Namibian courts are also swimming in an ocean of tribal conflicts involving competing clans who are all claiming to be authentic rulers of certain tribal areas.
Even where the courts have handed down their verdicts in such disputes, judges are still drowning in a pool of appeals against their judgments.
Addressing a conference of traditional leaders in Windhoek this week, the President explained that the proliferation of traditional authorities will, if poorly regulated, undermine unity and stability in the country.
Unity and stability, as emphasised by Pohamba, are some of the rarest commodities in African societies.
A growing fraction of the country’s social confrontations seems to emanate from tribal consciousness among our citizens, where individuals see themselves first as Aawambo, Ovahereo or Damara before being Namibian.
When individuals apply to be recognised as a new traditional authority, it is often because of their insatiable hunger for self-rule. In a unitary state like ours, self-rule undermines both the principle and the very force that has kept us together as a nation for the past 24 years when elsewhere in Africa, notably Rwanda in 1994 and Kenya in 2008, compatriots hacked one another to death with machetes.
In recent years, government has availed packages such as 4×4 vehicles to traditional leaders and this has seemingly fuelled too many people wanting to be recognised so that they lay their hands on perks that others are receiving.
Many commentators suggest that underlying ethnic cleavages in Africa are the source of domestic instability and conflict.
Rebel groups and political parties are organised on clan, tribal, or ethnic lines, and politicians and would-be leaders often play upon ethnic differences to rise to power.
Namibia has many tribally-aligned political formations, designed to cater only for the needs of the people of tribe A or B. In fact many politicians in our country use their tribal identities as a springboard to rise to the helm of political stardom.
In fact in our country, one hears time and again about assertions that government discriminates against this or the other group or clan. In fairness to government, there is no evidence of a systematic alienation of any tribe.
It is therefore crucial that we tread very carefully when dealing with applications for new traditional authorities, especially when approval of such applications leads to further fragmentation and division of our society.
Luckily for Namibia, since our independence in 1990, there have been subtle ethnic differences, which have been insufficient to create armed clashes between tribes.
But in a world where competition for resources gets intense by the day, it is imperative that we create a harmonious environment where each Namibian is made to feel part of the country and its future. We will not achieve this by approving too many tribal authorities, thereby promoting fragmentation.
This proliferation of traditional authorities is suspect, even when the real intentions could be harmless. One traditional authority’s uncertainty about the intentions of another group that applies for recognition leads to a cycle of mistrust.
And logically, since one group doesn’t know the other’s intentions, each has an incentive to build up its preparedness against the other. This has been the pattern of conflict and violence in Africa, which Namibia must avoid.
Traditional leaders must therefore come out of their cocoons and meet the President halfway in curbing the unnecessary influx of traditional authorities. Let’s invest our energies in building unity among all citizens.