Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
“Pro-poor economic vision” – enters Reverend Paul Isak last Friday in his article as guest of the editor of an English daily newspaper.
Thereby, he adds his name to the long list of what most, if not all, may ultimately be seen as apologists for the capitalist system in Namibia.
Various terms, descriptions, political and economic coinages have been used to describe what is fundamentally one and the same problem continuing to bedevil Namibia since independence: increasing inequality and the attendant, unabated impoverishment of a majority, if not most, of the Namibian population.
This is a situation that, in a clear act of political and economic chess, has been allowed to persist by the propertied class, the bourgeoisie, and its ideological hegemony, which has continued to hold the country hostage while promising change that has forever seemed elusive.
Economic freedom and emancipation have been among the buzzwords used by the elite as it continues to presumably search for a solution to the problem. Yet the problem is known very well. The elite has simply been dancing around the real problem – capitalism.
There is no denying that the economic system prevailing in a politically free and independent Namibia, but economically dysfunctional, if not altogether regressing and retrogressing, is capitalism.
As much as the Constitution would make us believe otherwise through the mere insertion of the term “mixed economy”, whatever this means, what the country has been doing, amidst and in the face of increasing and unabated deterioration in the standards of living of many, if not most, is for the ruling political elite and its fellow travellers, the economic masters, to hustle.
Hoping that through hustling, one day manna shall fall from heaven.
This is currently being envisaged and expected through the much-dreamt-about oil boom, which is supposed to uplift and extricate the country from its near-economic ruins.
But the biggest question staring Namibia in the face, as it has for some time now, is whether the current economic situation of stagnation at best, and at worst deterioration and eventual total collapse, shall be bettered by the much-anticipated economic boom, given the capitalist grip in which the country finds itself.
The answer to this question depends on one’s perspective of what the root cause or causes of the prevailing economic stagnation and social deprivation are.
While many are and have been aware of the prevailing unacceptable and unbearable socioeconomic conditions in the country, those in the know seem reluctant to pinpoint the causes thereof.
There has been unsettling and worrying denialism among many, with few exceptions, regarding the socioeconomic conditions visited upon many, if not most, citizens of the country, especially those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder.
“A small elite continues to control a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth, while many citizens struggle daily with poverty, unemployment, food insecurity and inadequate housing,” Reverend Isak states in the said article.
While this has been the case, what one has been hearing from the said elite is the swan song of growth, investment, peace and stability.
As if these, in themselves, shall solve, let alone fundamentally ameliorate, the socioeconomic hardships endured by most Namibians.
Hardships visited upon the wretchedness of Namibian society by the very capitalist system that the elite has been, and continues to be, all out at every available opportunity and platform to prop up.
This naturally prompts the question: How does the elite continue to placate and prop up the very system that is inflicting hardship on the citizens in whose best interests they claim to work?
Typical of any elite in an exploitative system such as capitalism, their own interests come first. This very much applies to Namibia’s political and economic elite.
“When the different liberation movements succeeded in regaining the independence of their countries, and thus realised both state sovereignty and self-determination, the petty bourgeoisie, which provided the leadership of the liberation movements, provided the leadership in the civil service as well as the leadership in the political arena and gradually in commerce and industry,” writes the late Botswana and African ideologue Dr Kenneth Koma in his treatise, The Second Phase of the African Revolution Has Now Began.
Needless to say, this is exactly where Namibia currently finds herself, with the Second Phase of the African Revolution hardly begun, if it is ever to begin.
As Yours Truly Ideologically has maintained all along, Namibia’s post-independence transition has never been clearly defined.
Simply because Namibia’s liberation era was devoid of sufficiently strong ideological content to pave the way for a fundamental socioeconomic transition after independence.
Namibia’s quest for independence was primarily based on nationalism – the removal of foreign rule and the transfer of political power to the indigenous population.
What was to be done with that political power afterwards was never clearly articulated, and remains ambiguous today.
Hence the unconscious and, at times, unconscientious use of catchphrases such as “economic independence” and “economic emancipation”.
For what they are really worth, they remain superficial concepts when divorced from an ideological programme for fundamental socioeconomic transformation.
If the essence of the liberation struggle was getting rid of colonialism, rather than capitalism, then now that colonialism has been formally dismantled, there cannot be much talk, let alone a revolutionary and ideologically inspired drive, to get rid of capitalism.
Thus, calls for economic emancipation, economic freedom and related concepts risk becoming precisely what they appear to be: ideologically void and hollow expressions that, rather than challenging the prevailing economic order, ultimately serve as apologies for capitalism.
