Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
Presumably the eighth administration of Namibia under Her Excellency Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, President of the Republic of Namibia, has been brought to power under the mandate of service delivery.
And indeed, it seems at a breakneck speed that this is what it has been striving to just do. Not that intrinsically there’s any wrong about a government delivering service to the citizenry. After all this, it is just what it was and has been mandated by the citizens when they voted it in power. But the question that begs is what service delivery is all about and what philosophy and/or ideological inclination underpins any service delivery.
Because service delivery can and means a lot of things. From ensuring, for instance, that school children, for starters, have all the basic necessities, like stationery and what they have. This is before first and foremost ensuring that education is universal.
Meaning that the government is not only committed to ensuring that every child has equal and equitable access to quality education, regardless of her/his socioeconomic status, gender or physical abilities. With this understanding, thus, service delivery in education presupposes not only the availability of physical buildings hosting children but also other basic ancillaries. Like libraries, science laboratories, computer laboratories, and so on.
In Namibia there are still children who are being taught in makeshift structures, or worse, even under trees. Education is but only one sector of service delivery. There are many other sectors which are and remain wanting in service delivery. Not only in the sense of inefficient and ineffective delivery of the required necessary services. But equally in terms of the beginning, the services they are receiving are, to start with, the services that they actually need. So it is not just a matter of delivering services but the right services.
A typical example is the road infrastructure. Is good road infrastructure in a typical rural village a basic need? Over and above other basic needs such as electricity? Thus, when talking about service delivery, due consideration must be given, for starters, to the philosophical considerations, if not only rationalisation and prioritising underpinning the provision of any service.
Lately, there has been so much talk about green hydrogen in Namibia. Does green hydrogen provide for the energy needs of most of our rural villages, which are still very much in need of electricity? I am sure the answer is a resounding no. Be that as it may be, then how can green energy be a priority to a country like Namibia that, in every sense, is still a village? If one is to make a comparison here with other countries, let alone the so-called developed countries.
Pan-Africanists like Walter Rodney wrote in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. A treatise and antithesis to the notion often advanced by Europeans as colonisers of Africa, that their mission was not colonisation but instead the civilisation and development of Africa.
With Rodney instead and, to the contrary, postulating that Europe actually not only arrested Africa’s development but also underdeveloped it.
This cannot but make one think what the term ‘development’, so often used by modern-day rulers of Africa, actually means. Because too often ‘development’ is a term that has regularly been used by African rulers and their self-made developers to justify whatever they have been engaged in after attaining political and flag independence. Which is and has been far from developing their own people. Because the question begs, how can one develop another instead of creating an enabling environment for her/him to advance and grow?
The word ‘development’ per se intrinsically denotes that those to be developed are incapable of self-growth, let alone self-realisation and/or actualisation. Thus needing to be pushed, it is not dragged along, let alone with things imposed on it.
This pushing and pulling, and/or dragging along, in the name of the so-called development has many a time been misdirected, if not altogether meaningless, in terms of the actual advancement of the intended targets socio-economically. Hence, the dependence syndrome often manifests among the so-called marginalised communities.
Which are nothing but the unintended consequence of those who have been under the false impression of developing others. Development is not and should not be imposed but must come naturally and/or come naturally. Not at the speed of the would-be developer and/or philanthropy.
The history of human development is not one of the imposition of development on them. Instead, their natural environments themselves have been the ones not only dictating and directing but at best encouraging, motivating, guiding and nurturing their development. Within a given space in time and at a given speed, which is natural and real and not artificial in its pace.
The pastoral communities in Namibia, like the Ovambanderu and Ovaherero, were once, that is before the advent of German colonialism, their pastoral self. But colonialism did not only disturb their development but altogether broke it.
Rodney’s notion of arrested development if not reversal of such development and resultant underdevelopment. For them, after German colonialism, having emerged from refuge in the wilderness and German concentration camps, the Ovambanderu and Ovaherero continued where they left off.
To this day, with little intervention from colonialism or whatever, they remain true to their pastoralism. Livestock rearing, herding and production. A significant contributor to the meat industry and its export market.
This cannot help but call for a review of the paradigm of development in an independent Namibia. As much as the application of this paradigm to each sphere of development in the country. Because in the final analysis it is not so much a lack of service delivery, but the misinterpretation and misunderstanding, if not altogether total lack of understanding of development and what it entails. Thus, its misapplication and implementation of the presumed development.
