Promises, promises, promises …

WITH the start of summer we’ve also heralded that silly season, the one that swings round every five years, which we otherwise refer to as the election period.

And once again our politicians have stirred themselves from their hibernation torpor and dusted themselves off, or are starting to, and are belching promises left and right.Various parties, those that have manifestos to speak of, unsurprisingly and to their credit have once again targeted the usual and perennially festering issues of land distribution/resettlement, unemployment, healthcare, poverty, HIV-AIDS, etc, and have fashioned their noise appropriately to sound grassroots and caring, which is as it should be. But, also unsurprisingly, once again great is the vagueness of their proposed solutions, if any can be discerned, to my and your issues. One almost gets the feeling that our politicians, and their respective parties, have this idea that elections mean slapping together some promises because it’s required of them and it seems to be a good idea because that’s what the handbooks say you have to do before an election. Take the promise of a basic income grant, as recently highlighted by Nudo and the APP in their manifestos, the obvious question to ask is where will the money come from? And that goes for every other campaign promise, including the issue of multi-year war veteran pay-outs, made by every party, being tossed about out on the trail. This needs to be asked against the backdrop of the depressing state of some key state revenue generation sectors, such as mining and tourism, and the universal economic woes still just starting to sweep through our economy. In fact, there’s no economic growth to speak of.On top of that, none are addressing civil service inefficiencies which have tended to compound poor service delivery on the very issues these politicians now so robustly promise to perform on. So how will they, whichever party they represent, stump up in money and action for their promises?I ask this because I’d like to encourage some sophistication, beyond squabbles over struggle credentials and flags in trees, in the election campaigning. And I’d like to make a suggestion to campaigning politicians – why not approach your promise-making as you would a tender process, which I think most politicians by now understand. Consider if you will, when you tender for a contract, that you need to give a scope of the work, the pricing, deadlines and outcomes. The bidder with the most attractive proposal should ideally win the contract. So why not consider us, the electorate, a tender board which you comprehensively have to convince of the soundness of your credentials and ability to deliver. Instead of pouncing on the obvious with emotional appeals to buy into half thought through and poorly articulated plans.For the discerning voter, the lack of depth and explanation of your proposals/promises indicates that you actually don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.All it achieves is make you look amateur. But just so we’re all clear about what we’re talking about, I think these are some of the more important issues that we need to hear addressed, coherently, a lot more through to November:Namibia is a country of two million with one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world; unemployment is estimated at over 50 per cent, while 80 per cent are estimated to have experienced hunger last year; 10 per cent of the population are orphans and more than 20 per cent are HIV infected; the education system is a failure and the public health sector is teetering; urban service delivery discontent is brewing, policing is shoddy, and corruption is rife.The point is we all know this. Listing issues in a manifesto is good and well, but what are the cost and expertise particulars, at least a lite version, of how they’re going to be tackled?In view of all this, as the electorate we should demand better campaigning and follow through on these issues and the promises made around them in the run-up to every election, instead of being swayed by what sometimes comes very close to fables being spouted from many campaign platforms. At some point we, the electorate, should hang our sign out, saying: Definitely no chancers, please.