PAUL T. SHIPALE
I read an opinion piece by Bob Kandetu written on 14 December 2024 and that appeared in the Confidénte of 20 December 2024-10 January 2025 titled; “Propagandists and disinformation, Thank you dearly Comrade Ellen Musialela”. In that article Kandetu advises the nation of the need to stay the course and be concerted and vigilant… betting that Mukwanangombe will do the best to appoint people of quality to her government.
Kandetu said “the Netumbo regime must not be perked on vengefulness, examining closets in bedrooms and what not. But the regime must see to it that not again shall we have Namibia’s economy be for the taking… and later explain why a tender with the most expensive condom will sail through and a 5 year old will win a tender, and a car part will cost 8 million dollars”.
President-elect Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was heard saying that she is not going to be digging graves, meaning she is not going to look into old skeletons. These are very powerful words and I hope they are also extended to those who were throwing harsh words at each other last year in answering affidavits submitted to the Courts last year and to the ‘very shameful Namibian citizen’ when some came out guns blazing, pouring cold water over claims that they described as actions of “desperate, wounded politicians.”
Leaders should not be afraid of criticism from any quarter. Quite the contrary, they need to temper and develop themselves and win new positions in the teeth of criticism and in the storm and stress of struggle. Fighting against wrong ideas is like being vaccinated — a man develops greater immunity from disease as a result of vaccination. Plants raised in hothouses are unlikely to be hardy. Carrying out the policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend will not weaken, but strengthen, the leaders’ position in the ideological field.
I am saying this because speaking to The Namibian newspaper last year, political analyst Ben Mulongeni said the party leadership needs to learn to deal with internal criticism. “One needs to understand the dialectical interdependence between the party and the people. If party leaders threaten, insult or expel party members who disagree, it can lead to the death of the party,” he said. Mulongeni also said when SWAPO expelled Panduleni Itula, a big portion of the party followed him and formed the rival Independent Patriots for Change. “Imagine if you fire every member who disagrees… how many people are going to remain in the party?” he asked. He said SWAPO’s internal conflicts and approach to dissent have led to reduced parliamentary seats and losses in regional and local government representation.
In addition, SWAPO lost an annual income of N$13 million following its loss of 12 seats in the November 2024 National Assembly elections. The party came down from 63 seats to 51 seats and this follows the trend of the former liberation movements losing their grip on power in Southern Africa such as when the ANC went from 57% in 2019 to 40% of the vote in the May 2024 elections and lost its outright majority for the first time after the ANC has dominated South African politics since winning in the first post-apartheid elections 30 years ago.
On his part, former Prime Minister Nahas Angula, when he was reacting to the outcome of the November 27 elections on the Namibian Sun Editor Toivo Ndjebela’s Agenda programme, said he does not think the people in Erongo Region will be able to forgive SWAPO for having being robbed of their source of income due to the fishrot scandal that happened five years ago and robbed SWAPO of 14 seats in 2019, yet the issue was not resolved ahead of the 2024 elections and the party lost another 12 seats for a total of 26 seats in five years.
Allow me to repeat here when I wrote about Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political theorist and activist, saying one of his most quoted phrases is his 1930 statement in the Prison Notebooks that says ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (‘fenomeni morbosi’). The central idea in Gramsci’s famous sentence belongs to the appraisal of any transitional phase during which an old order is already dying, but a radically different new one is not yet able to be born.
A first and most fundamental aspect of Gramsci’s thinking on this subject is that he understood crises not as static ‘events’, but as processes. This means, first, that crises are not framed as external shocks or exogenous events that break into a social order. Crises have in this sense a ‘history’, since they originate in contradictions or tensions in the old, dying social order. Second, if crises are not reducible to single, exogenous events, they represent more than just a single moment separating the old from the new order. They are, rather, long, multidimensional and transformative processes of economic and political insecurity that can last for decades and can develop a ‘life’ of their own. Both points emphasize the centrality of historical accounts in studying this ‘life’ of a crisis.
The second point concerns the distinction between what Gramsci described as ‘conjunctural’ and ‘organic’ crises. Conjunctural crises are those that appear in daily political life; they are usually of a less fundamental nature and, on their own, not system-changing. Only organic crises challenge the very fundamentals on which social orders are built. They produce the ‘morbid symptoms’ that disrupt everyday political and economic life and, in the long run, destroy old societal orders and power relations. This in turn leads to a ‘crisis of authority’ that leaves an ideological void and thus the possibility for different crisis solutions. The third point relates to what Gramsci describes as ‘morbid symptoms’. This term is part of his famous definition of crisis of authority.
Drawing on three Gramscian concepts related to crisis – processuality, organicity and morbidity, I argued that these elements capture conceptually three dimensions that are crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the contradictions that were addressed in August 1937 Selected Works by Mao Tse-tung, on his essay on philosophy, when he wrote on different levels of Contradictions after his essay “On Practice”.
There is nothing that does not contain contradiction; without contradiction nothing would exist. Contradiction is the basis of the simple forms of motion (for instance, mechanical motion) and still more so of the complex forms of motion. The universality of contradiction is illustrated as follows; In mathematics: + and – . Differential and integral; In mechanics: action and reaction; In physics: positive and negative electricity; In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms; In social science: the class struggle.
In war, offence and defence, advance and retreat, victory and defeat are all mutually contradictory phenomena. One cannot exist without the other. The two aspects are at once in conflict and in interdependence, and this constitutes the totality of a war, pushes its development forward and solves its problems. Thus it is already clear that contradiction exists universally and in all processes, whether in the simple or in the complex forms of motion, whether in objective phenomena or ideological phenomena.
According to Tse-tung, the fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. It is evident that purely external causes can only give rise to mechanical motion, that is, to changes in scale or quantity, but cannot explain why things differ qualitatively in thousands of ways and why one thing changes into another.
“Every organisation engaged in national liberation constantly has to isolate, analyse and search for solutions crucial both to its continued existence and growth, and to the success of the struggle as a whole in a certain sense, the story of our struggle is a story of problems arising and problems being overcome.” (Walter Sisulu, Reflections in Prison, 1976). Sisulu reminds me here of the Weapons of Theory’s speech by Amilcar Cabral delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana in January, 1966. Cabral referred to the struggle against our own weaknesses, saying “our experience has shown us that in the general framework of daily struggle this battle against ourselves – no matter what difficulties the enemy may create – is the most difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our peoples. This battle is the expression of the internal contradictions in the economic, social, cultural (and therefore historical) reality of each of our
countries. We are convinced that any national or social revolution which is not based on knowledge of this fundamental reality runs grave risk of being condemned to failure”.
Cabral further said, we know that on the political level our own reality – however fine and attractive the reality of others may be – can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices. Cabral concluded that the ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the national liberation movements – which is basically due to ignorance of the historical reality which these movements claim to transform – constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all. By this I mean let us avoid the temptation to do things based on emotions alone without any logic. Let us avoid to do things haphazardly, arbitrarily, randomly without any planning.
When Sun Wu Tzu said in discussing military science, “Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat”, he was referring to the two sides in a battle. Wei Chengi of the Tang Dynasty also understood the error of one-sidedness when he said, “Listen to both sides and you will be enlightened, heed only one side and you will be benighted.” But our comrades often look at problems one-sidedly, and so they often run into snags. Even in law there is the Audi Alteram Partem rule, or principle, which is a fundamental concept of natural justice that requires all parties involved in a dispute to be heard before a decision is made. The Latin phrase translates to “listen to the other side” or “let the other side be heard”. Instead people try to be superficial and looking at procedures instead of the substance of the matter.
To be superficial means to consider neither the characteristics of a contradiction in its totality nor the characteristics of each of its aspects; it means to deny the necessity for probing deeply into a thing and minutely studying the characteristics of its contradiction, but instead merely to look from afar and, after glimpsing the rough outline, immediately to try to resolve the contradiction (to answer a question, settle a dispute, handle work, or direct a military operation). This way of doing things is bound to lead to trouble, says Tse-Tung.
To be one-sided and superficial is at the same time to be subjective. For all objective things are actually interconnected and are governed by inner laws, but instead of undertaking the task of reflecting things as they really are some people only look at things one-sidedly or superficially and who know neither their interconnections nor their inner laws, and so their method is subjectivist. I argue that parties should avoid the temptation to always look at things from a subjective and emotional point of view. Leaders must on the one hand wage a serious struggle against erroneous thinking, and on the other give the members who have committed errors ample opportunity to wake up. This being the case, excessive struggle is obviously inappropriate. But if the people who have committed errors persist in them and aggravate them, there is the possibility that this contradiction will develop into antagonism.
In studying a problem, we must shun subjectivity, one-sidedness and superficiality. To be subjective means not to look at problems objectively, that is, not to use the materialist viewpoint in looking at problems. To be one-sided means not to look at problems all-sidedly, for example, to understand only the favourable conditions but not the difficult ones, only the past but not the future, only individual parts but not the whole, only the defects but not the achievements, only the plaintiff’s case but not the defendant’s, and so on. In a word, it means not to understand the characteristics of both aspects of a contradiction. This is what we mean by looking at a problem one-sidedly. Or it may be called seeing the part but not the whole, seeing the trees but not the forest. That way it is impossible to carry out assignments well or to develop inner-Party ideological struggle correctly.
To sum up, we must learn to look at problems from all sides, seeing the reverse as well as the obverse side of things, both the propagandists and the praise-singers. In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results and a good thing to bad results. I am delighted that the President-elect said the Ndilimani Cultural Troupe should compose a song praising the business people such as Chicco, unlike those who were heard saying Ndilimani Cultural Troupe should stop praising the Founding Father.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of my employer and this newspaper but solely my personal views as a citizen.
