A lack of sophistication in our politics has resulted in judgements based on what one sees.
Eyes alone are not enough. In politics, eyes may only see what has been decided.
Stories on the eight o’clock news are a selection from the many collected. Someone decides which story is covered and what appears on the front page.
Sophistication is needed beyond descriptions of what is shown, particularly when dealing with a nation’s politics.
Africa in general, and black people in particular, have for centuries suffered from approaches elevating description over explanation.
More than 1 800 years ago, ancient Greek physician Galen reduced the black person to two characteristics: the “inordinate length of the penis” and “hilarity, a strong propensity for laughter”.
This crude caricature was spread uncritically without explanation or interrogation of the sample size informing Galen’s conclusions.
When Sarah Baartman was paraded across exhibition halls in London and Paris because of what whites saw as “huge buttocks”, this exploitative framework had been planted centuries earlier.
This descriptive tyranny continued after colonialism ended.
‘ELITE MANNERISMS’
Speaking at a Senegalese university In 2007, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared: “The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has not entered into history enough.”
Despite The Gambia being one of Africa’s most beautiful countries, it has been internationally described – as noted by a 2024 World Bank study – as a mere haven for sex tourism, without explaining how European women exploit systemic poverty by buying younger local men.
After independence, African elites mimicked colonial mannerisms, adopting the very descriptive tools of their colonisers, as Frantz Fanon wrote in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’.
Achille Mbembe, in ‘On the Postcolony’, takes this further.
When intellectually challenged, the African postcolonial state mutates into a regime of violence characterised by theatrical power displays and institutional excess.
We see this in the eighth parliament: we have been treated to shallow discourse without reflective engagement or explanatory depth.
Society is told of “no law passed” and “walking out” without a sober structural and contextual explanation of why these events occur.
The current descriptive exercise suggests that parliament is an assembly line in a fish factory.
It does not explain that from 1884 to 1990, the colonial state passed just over 1 000 laws. For 36 years, the ‘free parliament’ passed a matching figure, averaging between 15 and 30 pieces of legislation a year.
Three decades later, between 100 and 200 colonial laws remain active on our books. In 2021, only three to four laws were passed.
It does not explain that when output was high it was because bills were often rushed or bulldozed through because of numbers, not superior logic, thinking and debate.
POWER DYNAMICS
Passing laws is one thing; putting them into operation is another.
Only six bills are before the National Assembly, yet the government is sitting on more than 30 passed laws never brought into force.
The Namibia Film Commission Act of 2000 has waited 26 years. The Accreditation Board of Namibia Act of 2005 remained in the dustbin for 21 years. The Lotteries Act of 2002 sat idle for 15 years.
The Property Valuers Profession Act has gathered dust for 14 years. The Whistleblower Protection Act has remained unimplemented for 10 years.
It is thus important to provide an understanding of space and time in our politics. Political behaviour, power dynamics, and institutional developments are shaped, restricted, and defined by geographic locations and historical context.
The current space and time mean the ruling party can no longer act with absolute impunity.
ADAPT OR ‘DIE’
Using the output of past Swapo-dominated parliaments to analyse the current parliament – with younger and thinking parliamentarians – is to fail to recognise shifting parameters.
Failing to adapt to a changing political epoch, the ruling party now expresses frustration through conjuncture when the reality is that MPs are rejecting old methods that reduced parliament to an extension of its musical group.
With few exceptions, parliament has not deployed its best brains to advance and win debates through superior logic. The only solution is bulldozing and voting.
Swapo’s parliamentary leadership has responded to robust debate by harassing MPs, turning up the heat and exposing their ineptitude.
This is the mutation Mbembe describes.
The party appears unaware of the consequences of its approach.
They seem unaware that it confirms the victims as fighters for the masses, while Swapo emerges as a new oppressor.
They fail to see that constant reliance on voting, bulldozing, and buying political parties with positions is an admission that the intellectual debate has been lost.
It is an approach that wins small battles while losing the war. The dripping of blood, however small, will ultimately lead to the collapse of the giant.
The masses, invited to sympathise with descriptive narratives, will soon realise that these self-serving narratives are false creations by a ruling elite unable to accept the politics of space and time.
FASHION FAIL
Swapo has lost another battle at the sophisticated intellectual level. Its attempts to force MPs – who wear clothes made by Namibian designers – to wear European dress codes expose it as an agent of European modernity at the expense of local and African trends.
Its obsession with colonial standards as “rules” and “decorum” is a surrender in the broader decolonisation debate. The failed attempt to prevent MPs from expressing themselves in local languages is another example.
There should be no sympathy for Swapo’s crocodile tears that laws are not being passed. The three laws passed in 2025 are the same as the three laws passed in 2021.
There are more laws passed which remain unimplemented compared to the six laws under consideration in parliament.
It is Swapo’s parliamentary leadership’s inability to understand the politics of time and space that best explains fiascos in our parliament.
A descriptive tyrannic discourse that fails to locate parliament within the current space and time demonstrates a mutation of Galen and Sarkozy’s paternalistic mindset.
CLARITY AND CHOICE
An open window exists for Swapo.
It, however, requires an understanding and acceptance of space and time – something that appears challenging for the Swapo leadership inside and outside parliament.
This window will provide clarity that strategic compromise, meaningful engagement, and institutional redesign may win the day.
It will also clarify that the traditional ‘enemy mindset’ of “not part of us” needs to be parked in Lubango.
This is generous advice. Swapo can ignore it. In that case, the defiant young MPs will neither waver nor disappear.
They can engage in cooperation, or they can engage in antagonism – all with equal distinction.
– Job Shipululo Amupanda is activist-in-chief of the Affirmative Repositioning movement, a member of parliament and an associate scholar at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.
