Namibia’s privilege and poverty: Liberation’s limits

‘Solidarity, Freedom, Justice’ was the guiding motive for the Namibian liberation movement SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organisation) in its struggle for self-determination and independence, guided by the intention to seize legitimate political power in a sovereign state to govern in the interests of the people. It was understood that such aspirations and their underlying notions imply an obligation if not a promise to the people: that the struggle against foreign rule, occupation and apartheid was also a struggle for political and social emancipation. This is namely that independence is the first necessary step towards building a new society, one which benefits the previously excluded, marginalised and oppressed colonised majority. The political programme adopted by the SWAPO Central Committee meeting from 28 July to 1 August 1976 in Lusaka stated: ‘social justice and progress for all is the governing idea behind every SWAPO policy decision’ (SWAPO of Namibia, undated: 45). Twenty years into independence, SWAPO has remained the sole political force responsible and accountable for the achievements, but also the failures, of our struggle.

FAILED PROMISES

Measured against the noble aim, post-independence statistics speak a sobering language: an official Household Income and Expenditure Review published towards the end of 2008 by the Central Bureau of Statistics revealed that almost one-third of the country’s 2 million people lived on US$1 or less per day. Moreover, the report also noted a sharp rise in households classified as ‘severely poor’, i.e., living on less than US$20 per month. The same survey found that one-fifth of the population has a share of 78.7 per cent of the country’s total income, while another fifth has to survive on 1.4 per cent of the country’s annual income.

Namibia ranks among those countries with the biggest income gaps in the world and the highest discrepancies in the distribution of wealth, as measured in terms of the Gini coefficient. Nominally, the average income per capita even among the poorer segments of society has grown slightly. But when contrasted and compared with the cost of living (just look at the price of one litre of milk, a bag of miliemeal, fruits and vegetables or a loaf of ordinary bread in our supermarkets!) and the lack of basic social services, as well as other criteria contributing to the Human Development Index, the overall trend is negative. As one UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)-affiliated economist concluded, ‘[O]ver time income poverty appears to be decreasing while human poverty is increasing’ (Levine 2007: 29). Moreover, according to official figures released in 2010, the unemployment rate has crossed the 50 per cent mark. In sum, this social reality contrasts sharply with the statement quoted from SWAPO’s political programme, suggesting that present-day Namibia is quite another country from the one the movement – as guided by promises of ‘solidarity, freedom, justice’ – suggested that it wanted to lead ‘towards the abolition of all forms of exploitation of man by man’ (SWAPO of Namibia, undated: 46).

In retrospect, measured against these stated policy intentions, one can only share the conclusion presented in a recent analysis by André du Pisani that the nationalist claim merely ‘operated as a rhetorical device, casting SWAPO in the role of “revolutionary agent,” bent on reconfiguring the socio-economic and political landscape’ (du Pisani 2010: 24). Yet, in fact, the reconfiguration of the socio-economic landscape, based on control over the political commanding heights of the newly proclaimed Namibian state, operated only through the vehicles of ‘affirmative action’ (AA) and ‘black economic empowerment’ (BEE), a redistributive strategy based on the cooptation of a new elite into the old socio-economic structures (cf. Melber 2007). As underscored by André du Pisani, the ‘national reconciliation’ of such a class character could only be ‘an elite discourse bent on maintaining the legitimacy of the state and responding to the inherent contradictions that characterize SWAPO’s [own] anti-colonial discourse’ (du Pisani 2010: 31).

In contrast to past promises, the new terminology by which the ordinary people have responded to the sobering realities since 1990 highlights reference to a new species, the ‘fat cats’. For it is well understood that a new political and bureaucratic class now uses its access to the country’s natural wealth to appropriate public goods and state property for private self-enrichment. Similar to such appropriation strategies in other countries of the region, we witness a ‘predatory elite’ in operation. This term was recently used by Jay Naidoo, who had been a long-standing trade union leader in the South African struggle for emancipation, then a minister, and is now among those self-critical voices admitting failure to deliver, if not betrayal of the people. Meanwhile, legitimacy for the unashamed appropriation strategy by those comrades in business has followed in Namibia the same tendency as in all other southern African cases of liberation movements as governments by being cloaked in a nationalist discourse. It has operated through an aggressively crafted version of ‘patriotic history’, supportive of the erstwhile liberation movement’s claim to be the dominant (de facto, one and only, solely legitimate) political force as representative of ‘the’ Namibian people – including, of course, the impoverished majority.

Making hardly any distinction between its roles as party, as government and as state, SWAPO has, since independence, stressed the notions of peace and stability while also paying lip service to democracy. Interestingly enough, the terms ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ have never featured prominently, if at all, in its official vocabulary since holding the political power as government. Instead, ‘national reconciliation’ became the programmatic slogan for a cooptation strategy based on the structural legacy of settler colonial minority rule and its corresponding property relations. SWAPO’s strategy becoming one of facilitating, as ‘cultural entrepreneur’, an elite pact designed to ‘reinvent’ by means of an Africanisation of the settler structure ‘an historical communality and continuity among the Namibian people(s) and [to project] a common destiny into the future’ (du Pisani 2010: 16).

What, in the meantime, of Namibia’s social structure? Here Volker Winterfeldt (2010) has recently offered some helpful methodological arguments as to the need to apply a more rigorous class analysis. While stressing the need for a more systematic and stringent methodology to explore the character of the ‘blackoisie’ in emergence, he pays little attention, however, to the rent-seeking nature of the new black class-in-formation, a blend of political office-bearers and of entrepreneurs. These are mainly fledgling business people, although more in the sense of ‘tenderpreneurs’ who lack substantial elements of the classic features of a bourgeoisie. As the former ANC (African National Congress) MP Andrew Feinstein explained with reference to similar strategies in South Africa:

‘The practice of high-ranking members of the party, and those close to them, benefiting from decisions about tenders of the government has become so widespread that the title “tenderpreneur” has been coined to describe the beneficiaries’ (Feinstein 2010).

Their strategies for securing and maximising profit are of a parasitic nature and not – like a ‘patriotic’ bourgeoisie – oriented towards long-term investment in productive sectors for the further accumulation of capital. Instead they use access to the state coffers for their self-enrichment strategy at the expense of the public purse (Melber 2007). According to a government official, himself a beneficiary of this form of ‘redistribution’, politics and economics are close bedfellows but clearly not about any meaningful kind of social reconstruction: BEE, in his honest view, is quite simply about, ‘empowering individuals who have business ideas and need information and capital to take off’ (The Namibian, 27 May 2010). This kind of individual reading of redistribution is in harmony with the neo-imperialist pact among elites, under which the unabated exploitation of the country’s natural resources continues without any meaningful benefits for the majority of the people.

‘International investors’ currently represent a wide panorama of old and new players. They range from the ABC of the ‘old’ imperialist powers (Australian, British, Canadian, French, German, Japanese and American multinationals), mainly operating in the mining and energy sector (while Spain has concentrated on the lucrative fishing industry), to the government’s fiercely competitive new friends beyond the ‘big brother’ on the other side of the southern border. These are: Russia offering to develop a nuclear reactor for local use of Namibian uranium and seeking to control access over the natural gas fields off the coast; India and South Korea joining the race for benefitting from the further exploration of the uranium deposits (Namibia ranks 4th among the world’s producers of uranium) with Iran already holding a smaller portion of shares in one of the established uranium mines; Brazil cooperating in the strengthening of a local navy; the Chinese entering the race not only for access to the country’s mineral and energy resources and base metals, but also for large parts of the construction sector; and with the North Koreans having built the pompous Heroes’ Acre and the megalomaniacal new State House complex. Out of business in all this are many pre-existing Namibian companies and their local workforce, while local hawkers and street vendors are confronted with the fierce competition of Chinese shops.

In fact, most new ventures simply generate – often with a short-term perspective – high profits at the expense of the local economy and people. The beneficiaries, such as they are, are – if at all – to be found only in the higher echelons of the public service or political offices, as the saga of the Malaysian textile manufacturer, Ramatex, suggests. This company started to manufacture apparel and textiles for export to the US market under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in a newly established complex in Windhoek. In a classic case of ‘race to the bottom’, several southern African governments had competed for favours in return for the sanctioning of the investment, with Namibia, in the end, winning out, but not for long. For several years Ramatex did indeed produce profits (to be transferred primarily to its Malaysian owners, of course), before closing down abruptly one day and re-locating its production to China where the Multi-Fiber-Agreement provided a more lucrative option. The Namibian taxpayers and the Windhoek municipality were the losers in this deal, while several thousand unqualified workers (almost exclusively young women) could merely return, after years of hard work under horrible conditions (no trade union was allowed in the factory and the Namibian labour laws were not applicable, since the location was declared a ‘free trade zone’) to their shacks without any compensation or savings. In his detailed case study, Winterfeldt (2007: 91) concludes:

‘Does this hold out the prospect of social progress, as measured against the principles of social equity? The liberal discourse, whether in its classical or its present shape, boldly rests on the glorification of the principle of social retardation: first comes the successful individual, the entrepreneur; then (if all goes well, and always to a lesser extent) society, that productive majority actually instrumental in creating economic wealth. First come, first served. The liberal economic ideology is not the epitome of social responsibility. It is class-biased, and so is its concept of development… The analysis of Ramatex’s Namibian operations shows that neoliberal economic orientations, seen in the long term, tend to affect or even negate collective structures based on social solidarity. Conversely, any vision of social welfare must [instead] make the preservation and promotion of collective structures of social solidarity the focal point of accelerated sustainable development.’

BIG AND ‘FAT CAT’ SYNDROME

The recent debate around a basic income grant (BIG) bears the promise of something a bit different. Indeed, BIG has help launched a significant symbolic discourse as regards social policy priorities under the current government. The BIG initiative, springing from a campaign spawned by a church and labour movement alliance, in collaboration with like-minded NGOs, undertook a pilot project in one selected (and quite destitute) village, which paid monthly cash allowances of N$100 to each individual resident there in an effort to convince the government that, in the absence of any other meaningful alternative, this might for the time being begin to contribute to the empowerment of local communities. Yet since its inception BIG has been met with an almost knee-jerk response that ridicules such proposals for financial transfers as naïve justifications for free rides for those who do not really want to earn a decent living by working with their own hands.

Thus, when President Hifikepunye Pohamba delivered his State of the Nation address in Parliament earlier this year, he was asked his views on BIG and on the attendant demands that the Namibian government should introduce a generalised BIG for all Namibians. His position: to dismiss BIG as a form of exploitation of those who are able and privileged to earn their living through work, which provides them and their families with a salaried income, while their taxes would then be used as payouts for others! Quite simply, for Pohamba and for other political leaders, greed seems to be much the more acceptable way. Note that it was these same political leaders who reportedly celebrated the 20th anniversary of Namibia’s independence by toasting with French champagne at N$1,000 a bottle. Moreover, cabinet members recently were granted new top-class Mercedes Benz limousines, perhaps (as the permanent secretary, seeking to justify the expenses for this fleet reportedly amounting to some N$300 million indeed suggested!) because the cars in use had become too small for their well-fed bodies!

As if to add insult to injury, the Namibian trade union umbrella body, the National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW), announced in July, and out of the blue, that, with immediate effect, it had abandoned the BIG coalition. NUNW is, as it happens, affiliated to SWAPO and the move was widely seen as a response to the president’s dismissal of the initiative. The NUNW president in a press conference cited a lack of creative ideas to address poverty as the reason for this move and stated: ‘We are sincere in our belief that there’s serious need for poverty alleviation in this country. We believe that that the [BIG] coalition’s idea is good but not the best. We’re striving for the best.’ He failed to offer a proposal, however, of which circumstances would be the best, but merely emphasised the need to reproduce wealth, which, in his view, would be almost impossible if money were handed out to individuals for free: ‘We’d rather suggest that instead of giving out $100 to everyone each month, Government should be pushed to make it easier for equity participation by Namibians in local companies.’ (New Era, 8 July 2010).

This sounds more of the same self-enrichment strategy for individuals with access to the state’s coffers, which are filled with revenue income and pension money and abused for dubious handouts disguised as deals claiming to represent an empowerment strategy but merely ending in fiascos for the public purse. All too often the beneficiaries of such an empowerment strategy are found among the former trade union officials and higher-ranking public servants as well as political office-bearers, but hardly ever (if at all) among those who would qualify as truly in need of some financial support to embark on a meaningful business to feed themselves and those able to be employed for the further creation of wealth. Seeming representatives of the organised Namibian labour movement had come a long way from the days when the slogan ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’ had a different meaning – forgetting, apparently, that solidarity is a complementary notion to social justice and part of an ongoing struggle to achieve it. The total loss of N$1.8 billion as estimated by Namfisa (including the estimated opportunity costs of N$1.2 billion) as a result of the N$650 million in capital losses wasted through the failed Development Capital Portfolio (DCP) of the Government Institutions Pension Fund (GIPF) as reported in The Namibian (6 August 2010) would have come a long way if spent on other forms of ‘poverty reduction’ than easing the plight of the failed entrepreneurs who cash in their status as previously disadvantaged at the expense of the truly disadvantaged masses.

SOLIDARITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE, NOT CHARITY

Of course, BIG may not be, in and of itself, the best answer in order to solve the challenge of structurally rooted inequality and destitution in Namibia. But at least the initiative had sought to contribute to creating a society in which all members obtain the minimum standard of living they deserve. It has been an effort to create an environment that could begin to enable the excluded to master their living conditions in a more empowering way and with some degree of dignity, allowing for self-respect. In Namibia, any such effort is simply dismissed by those who seem to care more about securing and further advancing their own privileges than showing empathy with the plight of ordinary people. But the hard-fought-for liberation from minority rule (and against privileges for a few at the expense of the majority) must now mean more than merely the renewed promotion of Social Darwinism. As a result of this latter mindset the fat cat (species Namibiana) prospers and advances – while, in sharp contrast, the people of Namibia, who are battling to survive their anything-but-self-inflicted misery, are once again quite simply losing out. The BIG initiative does at least suggest that some resistance remains. Indeed, for so long as ‘a luta continua’ continues to be translated, in practical terms, as ‘the looting continues’, the struggle in Namibia will be far from over.

The controversy around BIG provides interesting evidence that it mobilises a debate, which has its focus on delivery and the plight of the poor. The fact speaks for itself, as the Windhoek Observer in its 22 July issue titled its editorial with ‘Let them eat cake’ (thereby revoking the memory of Queen Marie Antoinette, who allegedly made this flippant remark in the 18th century French monarchy when hearing about the protesting masses who during a famine demanded bread). The editorial in the state-owned New Era of 6 August appeals to ‘[f]ind amicable solution to BIG’. These are indications for a concern that the official responses to the BIG initiative lack the degree of social awareness one would expect from the political leaders in this country, who claim to act in good faith and the public interest. In addition to similar doubtful views expressed in the public arena through SMSes and readers’ letters in the print media, postings on the SWAPO party website also suggest that the BIG remains a contested issue even inside the belly of the beast.

There seems to emerge a certain degree of productive confusion, at least among a few of those, who are guided by and maintain a rather strict loyalty to the political dons and their official positions – if only in the interest of their own career. A case in point is the latest opinion article by the SWAPO party Youth League proponent Paul Shipale. He indicated his willingness to engage critically with the notion of BEE and offers a courageous (mis)representation of Marxist thought, merely to end with another blatantly apologetic pseudo-reasoning for neoliberal Social Darwinism cloaked in a preference for individual liberties. As he daringly suggests:

‘Tyranny is when a governing power defines and enforces charitable giving against your will. The concepts of individual freedom, liberty and unalienable individual rights cannot coexist with the concepts of “social justice,” for there is no means by which to provide “social justice” which does not trample on the individual rights of some, for the benefit of others. For the nation to be “socially just,” it must trade individual freedom and liberty for the right to “equal stuff’”’ (Shipale 2010).

You cannot get it much more wrong in the effort to abandon any social responsibility. Even at the height of Cold War defamation strategies against anything, which smelled of socialism, the apologetics of the ‘capitalist freedom’ were hardly as daring to deny as bluntly any social responsibilities. Actually, the social welfare systems of enlightened capitalist societies would then have been in constant violation of such fundamental principles of freedom by supporting the individual autonomy of people allowing them to develop their freedom as responsible and active members of a society, in which they have a minimum material security through the policy of the state. Why then, following the approach advocated by Shipale, not stop paying taxes as a legitimate entitlement of the individual freedom of choice over collective responsibility? After all, tax contributions are among others supposed to finance social responsibilities executed by the state and its authorities in the public interest, and not supposed to offer free rides for the new elite.

Recall the social awareness and responsibility expressed by Thomas Paine, in his tract ‘Agrarian justice’ of 1797, where he argues for the creation of a national fund to provide every citizen above the age of 21 with an annual financial amount independent of their other income and property. ‘Poverty’, as he diagnosed, ‘is a thing created by that which is called civilized life.’ As a result, so-called civilisation, ‘make[s] one part of the society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot in a natural state.’ He therefore maintained: ‘It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.’ In Namibia, more than two centuries later, the argument still holds.

John Saul (2010) quotes the South African prelate Reverend Fuleni Mzukisi, who in 2008 expressed his frustration over the lack of delivery by commenting that poverty was now worse than apartheid and a ‘terrible disease’:

‘Apartheid was a deep crime against humanity. It left people with deep scars, but I can assure you that poverty is worse than that… People do not eat human rights; they want food on the table.’

The reverend is however overlooking that indeed food on the table is a fundamental human right (even though many do not even have a table to put the food on, provided they would have something to eat). According to John Saul, such a sad if not tragic state of affairs in southern Africa (by no means restricted to social realities in Namibia alone) reflects a choice of economic strategies,

‘that can now imagine only elite enrichment and the presumed “trickle down benefits” of unchecked capitalism as being the way in which the lot of the poorest of the poor might be improved there. How far a cry this is from the populist, even socialist hopes for more effective and egalitarian outcomes that originally seemed to define the development dreams of all the liberations movements. Indeed, what is especially disconcerting about the present recolonization of the region under the flag of capitalism is that is has been driven by precisely the same movements (at least in name) that led their countries to independence in the long years of overt regional struggle’ (Saul 2010).

Privilege and poverty as the two faces of Namibia’s society are a complementary result of the limits to liberation and the failure to transcend the colonial legacy into a human-centred (in contrast to an elite-centred) project of emancipation from the scourges of the past. Poverty remains a festering wound, reminding us of the promises betrayed. Privilege and poverty are, however, not really two faces. They are inseparable integral parts in reproducing the structures of a deeply unequal society at the expense of the majority of the people – a far cry from the noble policy declarations adopted during the struggle days. Namibians deserve better. Privilege and poverty are two sides of one ugly face, which is in urgent need of more than merely cosmetics.

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* This paper is based in part on a text published in September 2010 in Africa Files, at issue ezine (vol. 12, no. 5).
* Dr Henning Melber joined SWAPO in 1974 and was director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) between 1992 and 2000. He is currently executive director of The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Sweden.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

REFERENCES

du Pisani, André. ‘The Discursive Limits of SWAPO’s Dominant Discourses on Anti-colonial Nationalism in Postcolonial Namibia – a First Exploration’, in André du Pisani/Reinhart Kößler/William A. Lindeke (eds), The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia. Freiburg: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut 2010, pp. 1-40

Feinstein, Andrew. ‘Rise of the tenderpreneuers, the fall of South Africa’, New Statesman, 7 June 2010

Levine, Sebastian. Trends in Human Development and Human Poverty in Namibia. Background paper to the Namibia Human Development Report. Windhoek: UNDP, October 2007

Melber, Henning. ‘Poverty, politics, power and privilege – Namibia’s black economic elite formation’, in Henning Melber (ed.), Transitions in Namibia – which changes for whom? Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute 2007, pp. 110-129

Saul, John. ‘Southern Africa: The Liberation Struggle Continues’, Africa Files, at issue ezine, vol. 12, no. 1, May 2010

Shipale, Paul T. ‘PRE-vue [discourse’s-analysis] TRI-vium – Let’s finish the BEE building’, New Era, Windhoek, 6 August 2010

SWAPO of Namibia, The Constitution and The Political Program. Lusaka: SWAPO Department for Publicity & Information, undated.

Winterfeldt, Volker. ‘Liberated economy? The case of Ramatex Textiles Namibia’ in Henning Melber (ed.), Transitions in Namibia – which changes for whom? Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute 2007, pp. 65-93

Winterfeldt, Volker. ‘Postcolonial Dynamics of Social Structure in Namibia’, in André du Pisani/Reinhart Kößler/William A. Lindeke (eds), The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia. Freiburg: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut 2010, pp. 139-170