Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
Are increased investments – or investments without any limit – the ultimate answer to poverty, inequality, and all the socio-economic ills under which a section of the Namibian population is currently and increasingly suffocating?
Yours Truly Ideologically cannot but think loudly, in view of the fact that current focus is so much on attracting foreign direct investments, without giving the flipside of any investment or hearing anything else from the political principals.
If indeed the requisite investments – whatever “requisite investments” actually means – are the ultimate and everlasting solution to the abject poverty and inequalities in the country.
Truth be told, Namibia has not only been attracting investors but has indeed been realising investments in the country.
Yet these cannot by any measure be said to have made a dent, however small, on the continued state of poverty and inequalities that, since independence, have been increasing instead of subsiding.
This begs the question: if the country has been attracting investments, but such have not been able to make any difference in poverty and inequality levels, is it a matter of the investments flowing in having been insignificant to stem the widening and deepening trend?
Or is it a matter of investments per se not being the panacea to the evident socio-economic state of retardation and stagnation – if not retrogression – that most citizens have been experiencing, besides for a negligent 2% or so that seem to have been the anointed beneficiaries of investments, not because they are any more deserving than anyone, but because of the dictates and vagaries of capitalism?
Yet, despite the obvious lack of a trickle-down effect on ordinary people from any given investments – whose impact on the masses, if anything, is hidden – the country’s political principals have been harping on the need for investments, leaving Yours Truly Ideologically to wonder what measure of investments would be enough to have the desired dent, in the least, on the negative socio-economic conditions of most of the country’s inhabitants – notably those at the lower end of the scale who must and should foremost be benefiting from any investments.
Currently, the focus of the political principals is on investments in the energy sector, notably oil exploration, with the latest indication being that the country is striking gold in this regard.
But be that as it may, given the country’s political principals’ ideological – or non-ideological – apathy, is any oil find and its eventual production to have the desired socio-economic impact on the impoverished masses of the country?
Supposedly the actual owners of her natural resources, with the political principals, government, and legislature merely holding these natural resources in trust for them – meaning protecting them against exploitation against the best interests of the people, and/or against overexploitation lest they are depleted with no marked impact on the betterment of the socio-economic conditions of the people.
But what has transpired thus far regarding the exploitation of the natural resources being extracted and exploited currently is that the trickle-down to the masses has been negligible, if there has been any at all.
Thus, despite the extraction and exploitation ventures ongoing in the country, there is little reason to believe that with the expected oil boom, the people shall benefit to the extent of the country evolving towards equality and egalitarianism.
Simply because the government is not given – let alone has not started – to think and entertain egalitarianism. Its obvious disposition currently is to see more investments only for those close to investors, including those in the government machinery, whether in the executive or legislature, to line up for the crumbs falling from the tables of investors.
The situation that was prevalent in the colonial era very much still pertains to this day in an independent Namibia, where independence has and is continuing to legitimize the exploitation and/or overexploitation of the country’s resources by capitalist ventures in the name of the free market.
This is despite Namibia constitutionally being a mixed economy, which practically means nothing other than the country applying a capitalist free market system – the essence of which is, first and foremost, profit. Namibia is a capitalist country to the core, and there is nothing in between.
Thus, as long as this remains the orientation of the country, her political principals, the honourables and excellencies – as you would have them – a situation that since independence has been going on unchallenged in any serious ideological sense, there is no way the political principals can convince the country, including the workers, that the state is working in the interests of the people, including the workers, other than in its own interest.
Its own interest currently in Namibia meaning the comprador bourgeoisie – the socio-economic class that aligns its financial and political interests with foreign imperial powers or multinational corporations, rather than with their own domestic economies.
Yours Truly Ideologically shall be naïve to think that Namibia is so independent and so free from foreign imperial capitalist powers, given the untouchable multinational corporations who are still not only pulling the political strings but calling the shots, with the politicians singing no other chorus than capitalism – with its flipside being exploitation and the resultant and attendant poverty and inequalities.
Be this the true state of affairs, what investments are we talking about if not these very multinationals? What is Namibia’s response to the challenges posed by these multinationals and their investments?
This is the bold question the country must confront but which she has conveniently been dodging, if not altogether diving and ducking, in the name of peace and stability – which in the final analysis is in the name of investments. Investments which have never been trickling meaningfully down to the masses, including the workers.
