Nahas is being disingenuous on Swapo TSUDAO GURIRABWe read, with much angst and puzzlement, an opinion piece by Gideon Nahas Angula in The Namibian of Friday, 19 March. The immediate reasons for Katusha’s deus ex machina appears to be notes by Sageus Shangala, former minister of justice and Central Committee member, from his prison holding cells at Witvlei. Sageus, it appears, has spent the time at Witvlei to author a tomb for Swapo's soul searching and revival. This, among others, does not seem to sit pretty with former minister Angula, who is a Central Committee member of Swapo and a commercial farmer in the Otjiwarongo area. Angula's scribblings are, however, not limited to shouting Sageus down. As a former teacher, he has not lost his craft of being a two-handed operator.
One such trick of his fast hands is to 'reclaim' Swapo's history from upstarts of Sageus's ilk; market Swapo's historic ideological roots and finally make short shrift of what he styles as "new politicians … crawling back into their primordial cocoons because they feel they have been excluded."
What he fails to fathom, however, is that there will be no welfare gains in the lives of ordinary Namibians irrespective of the number of times he runs up Dune 7 and proclaims these purported Swapo's principles however noble or otherwise they may be. The proof of the pudding, sages tell us, is always, but always, in the eating. It also seems disingenuous to pass off the failures of his party and government as an outcome of some "infiltrators'. In Swapo's chequered history, the ghost of 'infiltrators' has always been resurrected from the days of the 'Old Farm' to smother divergent views even if it amounts to the murder of thousands.
As the first generation born in the promising and exciting years of the 1990s reach adulthood, we run the risk of being irrelevant as we continue to live a lie. The facts are that the State is the single largest employer as the private sector sheds jobs. Despite Providence having dealt us a fair hand we have grown into a nation of grey civil servants with three or four civil servants doing the same job - making photocopies. At the same time, economic growth is static and the number of those who live on the State's purse multiply by the day..
The political playing field is crowded not for the reasons Katusha proffers. On the contrary, we surmise that our politics will self-correct and consolidate further down the road in the political theatre of the day. For Katusha and others, the moment of the white knight may, unfortunately, be creeping near despite them clutching on to the blue, red and green for dear life. Congress 2022 may be a deserving, if ignominious, exit for many as it is clear that elections 2024 will produce a novel political map of the country. As for Katusha, it may mean spending more time with his cows at Otjiwarongo.