A nation of civil servant, self-enrichment Being a civil servant of the government means that your duty is to uphold and represent certain important tasks in the national interest for the whole population. This will depend on your portion of the task you are delegated to perform, but the need and obligation to provide services in national interest is the only principal motive at stake. But of course, welcome to Africa’s Namibia where everyone and everything seems to either be misplaced or misunderstood, were self-enrichment over the nation’s interests is best illustrated at heart or in simple terms a nation were politics of the belly is exercised at its best, never mind other neighbouring countries - our own mess is equally messy. You can only blame the bureaucracy to a certain extent, because the people at the wheel either do not understand the concept of good governance or have simply never heard of it. In the Namibian local government system context for example, its existence is for two purposes; namely for civic and utilitarian consideration. Civic consideration is a politically driven objective to help encourage freedom, inclusivity and transparency in democracy, as well as employment by all, whereas the latter is for administrative purposes to simply render services to the masses. But failure to distinguish between the two can exhaust the efforts of either parties to bring about the needed development in the community.
For the utility consideration, effects are far worse on the community as they have a direct impact on the community development… cases such as drought and lack of public services in remote areas are all the results of either incompetent or/and unqualified personnel in regional offices, or are secondly simply due to political interference in administrative matters such as a politician influencing the decisions made by tender boards or in hiring administrative officers in favour of their comrades or through nepotism… all of which seriously hampers the progress of any local government because it entails that officials in the community’s driving seats are not hired on merit, leading to missing out on the best candidates for such positions required to effectively and efficiently enhance community development projects. This is true in the Namibian context where we witness after 26 years of independence there has been no newly developed town to a municipality level but yet, State funds are twice exhausted for such purposes, lack of public institutions (centralisation) in remote areas and lack of public goods and services (roads, water, latrines and schools) on the ground or at grassroots levels in communities. Thus if we are ever to have hope of having a well-established governance system with efficient and effective management, I plead as a youth citizen to the president and his fellow elites to encourage and uphold good governance systems and advocate for a change of recruitment process in the bureaucracy system and lay off the free riders that do not have a knowledge of the functions of their positions.
The President once urged his fellow comrades to start reading their duty lists before publically declaring they don’t know what purpose they served, implying that they are either lazy or the instructions weren’t as clear as should be, but we as the youth have a choice to raise our voice against being represented by such disorganised representatives.
Civil servants are only happy to be doing their jobs for money rather than for national pride and national development and instead, when an opportunity for corruption presents itself, they are happy to seize it at the cost of the government incurring financial loses and becoming unable to meet its intended projects and goals. They have developed stubborn and aggressive attitude towards concerned citizens questioning the lack of transparency and openness methods they use when being pressed over some dubious decisions they make.
They are quick to fire threats and make self-victimising statements to help hide their corrupt practices and try to manipulate the justice system, by playing the victim. Some key elites have become the tender board’s celebrities.
Well we (the youth) can only take so much, therefore it is time we say enough is enough, and if the elites think they can get away with everything and not be held accountable then they have it wrong, because our eyes and ears are open now. They should understand that being a public servant means you are open or exposed to public scrutiny as well and not the other way around. The way it looks now is that even the youths are bound to be groomed into it and to follow suit on this path of injustice and corruption… but we can become conscious to fight and rebuke it. We are the future and it is brighter together. Looking up to some intellectuals such as Robert Nozick’s distributive justice theory would help pave the way forward, towards equal resource distribution.
*Romeo Mungamba is a third year student studying towards a Bachelor of Public Management (Honours) at the University of Namibia.