Roads and Statues – not good enough

In a recent interview with the country’s biggest newspaper, The Namibian, outgoing Namibian president his former Excellency Hifikepunye Pohamba asked his interviewer, “Do you see the roads? If you see them, why don’t you write and put in in the newspapers.”

He was referring to what he views as a negative stance by the paper towards the government. He was slightly irate and questioned why the paper was full of negative stories about the government.

“I am not saying you should not write negative stories about the government. Let’s write it but it should not be 100%.”

His former Excellency (who is currently passing the torch onto his successor as I write this) then pulled a classic move from the playbook, he went on to list the infrastructure built by the government on his watch. The roads (nice roads, I must say), University campuses, the state house, and a few statues.

I must admit that the Namibian government over the last 25 years has done well in terms of infrastructure development. We have a great road network, rural electrification is slowly progressing, although there are still rural areas without potable water. They’ve built schools, hospitals, administration offices. But after 25 years, is that really enough, can we still boast about it?

To me this is a classic case of, “Ka kola kekulye.” An Oshiwambo proverb that loosely means ‘raise the hound that will bite you’. The Namibian newspaper supported the current government and vice versa, when their common enemy was the oppressive regime of Apartheid South Africa. The newspaper told it like it was, often exposing gross atrocities and leaning towards the current government. Now that the Namibian newspaper is criticizing the current government, it’s suddenly too negative. So who changed? Was it the newspaper or the government? I’ll leave this here.

Back to my point, are roads really a measure of our progress as a nation? Most of the roads his former Excellency mentioned were supervised by the Chinese with local labour, the new fancy State House was as well, and to top it off, the statues in front of the new national museum were made in South Korea. Should we really be bragging about this? We’ve got a massive social inequality problem, a huge youth unemployment issue, and a headache of an urban land predicament. Should we really be bragging about roads that other countries built for us? Shouldn’t we be trying as hard as we can to make sure that the graduates from our engineering school are in a position to build our roads for us in the future? That’s something we could be able to brag about.

In my opinion we’ve come to a point, where basic infrastructure development is really something that government is supposed to do. It’s like a kid at a private school getting good grades, it’s something that’s to be expected, and nothing special (It’s in the National Development plans). We should be looking to challenge ourselves and attempt to over achieve (Free tertiary education anyone?).

What’s your take? Let me know, drop me a comment.

And, happy Independence Day to my fellow Namibians all over the world. 25 years and still a beacon of hope and progress.