The politically unconscious become SRC By Matheus Pendapala Taapopi There are self-imposed myths, limitations and serious contradictions in the Unam management, and its SRC, that beg for honest engagement and critical analysis. The student body’s potential to produce and nurture leaders of an ‘astute intellectual and social calibre’, is confined and reduced to false notions that anybody who has a theoretical understanding of university literature, who is popular for the wrong reasons, who is in favour with management, or with a good academic record, with some sense of leadership experience as requirement, is enough and thus qualified to be a Student Representative Council (SRC) member. This is a fatal flaw. It sets forth a bad precedence for the present and future SRC body, and has thus devalued and discouraged progressive and potential student activists from being SRC members, to enter a system that will reduce them to complacency and mediocrity.
As of note, the current SRC members, lack political orientation and consciousness, they have detached politics from the operations of their responsibilities and objectives. This is of course due to the fact that most fail to understand that the SRC subscribes to democratic principles, hence it’s a political body for students, it comes with political objectives and structures, for which no SRC members are held accountable, the financial process lacks transparency and this is certainly due to the fact that these bodies are pure window dressing, while the SRC Constitution is vague and begs for critical amendments. We have allowed a situation where the SRC decides the fate of the students without their active contribution to the determination of those decisions, the SRC should not act a decision-making body, but a decision-implementing body. Students have been reduced to mere voting fodder that are only ever seriously engaged at the SRC Manifesto, when candidates want their votes, only to be remembered the following year for the same reasons. Students are not engaged on every issue, students are not leading with the SRC and ideas are birthed without their input.
The SRC doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it most certainly is an integral component of a broader pattern of representatives in society. Hence the individuals who are elected are not just for the SRC and its university, but are the face of the future of this country and it’s a future that has been tempered with, since they have neutralised and compromised the student body. The SRC has assumed roles that are far from their roles and objectives, they became genuine representatives of management, they now ensure toilets are cleaned, lecture halls’ lights and projectors are in service, they became assistants for NSFAF and continue to be more invested and dedicated to entertainment events instead of policy reform and advocates of social justice.
As a result Unam is no longer a breeding ground where student leaders are birthed; it is not a breeding ground for political leaders, for they don’t find a voice here. This is because Unam’s management doesn’t tolerate and promote academic thought and freedom, especially radical and militant views. From conceptualisation, the university is expected to engage in critical inquiry, it ought to acquire information, develop into a body of knowledge to be disseminated for improving the conditions of humanity and address the challenges we face as a society. Secondly, universities are a community of members concerned with and engaged in seeking truth, with a scholarly primary concern and a reformist secondary concern. Moreover an inevitable product of knowledge and enlightenment is the desire to bring change to the status quo.
In that regard, if it is to achieve the objectives that are espoused in its constitution, the SRC should understand their responsibility to be that of determining the politics of the day and leading public opinion. The SRC should assume a role of activism, students should rise and oppose injustice, focus should be shifted to critically assess government’s performance, in as far as it relates to students, employment security upon graduation and youth empowerment, and equally oppose the slow pace of development in communities where their students live. The SRC must be in contact with Nanso, the umbrella body of student activists and the political umbrella of all students, so as to align responsibilities, objectives and share ideas.
The SRC must be a body capacitated with individuals that understand student governance, who will carry forth the mandate given to it by the students, as well be able to contribute significantly to the broader objectives of national development, so as to serve as a cornerstone of policy analysis for the government. This is a humongous responsibility that needs the most dedicated, capacitated and political conscious crop of student leaders. It is therefore not a task just for any student who wakes up ambitious, with mercenary reasons. Leaders are made, not born, and the notion that “everyone is a leader”, perpetuates an untruth that has found a home in the minds of young people that are politically unconscious. As students, we must no longer allow anyone to contest in elections, without political orientation, consciousness and an understanding of student governance, because they are going to fail to locate the SRC in the broader sense of politics of society it belongs.
* Matheus Pendapala Taapopi is a third-year student, studying towards a Bachelor of Public Management (Hons), at the University of Namibia.