Should Namibians Vote?

The crisis of liberal democratic politics is on full display in Namibia.

Political parties participating in the November elections all appear to be centre-right organisations with insignificant differences among them.
By and large, the elections will be about the superficiality of personality politics.

Consequently, soft authoritarianism is everywhere.

Swapo has a dismal record of high unemployment and a lack of housing.

The party built less than 22 000 houses in three decades and it is therefore difficult to believe the talk of natural resource beneficiation and youth empowerment.

Maybe it is unsurprising as the party has never had a culture of intellectualism. Not to mention the rampant corruption and widespread nepotism.

SYMBOLISM OR SUBSTANCE?

The Independent Patriots for Change (IPC) persists with centre-right policies.

It favours austerity measures (such as fiscal discipline), which result in social disintegration.

In this context, youth entrepreneurship and home ownership are impossible.

The IPC also erroneously suggests that short-term job opportunities are a youth employment guarantee scheme. 

The Landless People’s Movement (LPM) refers vaguely to the state of the economy and food insecurity (no mention of food sovereignty or the agrarian question).

The Popular Democratic Movement’s catchy slogan of ‘one constituency, one factory’ explains nothing and is hardly a serious solution for unemployment. Swanu has openly shifted to the right with support for the death penalty and homophobia.

The desperation of parliamentary politics leads to opportunism.

Affirmative Repositioning (AR) and the Namibian Economic Freedom Fighters (NEFF) don’t seem to have clear political identities.
Symbolism without substance is meaningless.

‘ZONE OF STORMS’

What is glaringly absent from public discourse is a left-wing conversation about a wealth tax, a proper job guarantee programme, food sovereignty, social housing and the neoliberal pension disaster.

Big business continues to make the important decisions while those political actors clamouring for places in parliament are lost in tangential discussions.
This version of democracy has nothing to do with power to the people.

If anything, the dominance of the capitalist market in Namibia leads to permanent social breakdown.

And Western imperialism ensures that our surplus value is transferred to the Global North or invested in financial speculation.

That is why the goal of debt reduction is a deliberate fabrication as it enables the absorption of the surplus.

Egyptian economist Samir Amin writes in ‘The Long Revolution of the Global South’ that imperialism holds the monopolies in natural resources, financial flows, new technologies, communication and weapons of mass destruction.

The only option for the Global South is to delink from the global system of monopoly capitalism.

The latter led to lumpen-development on the periphery and the dramatic rise in survivalist activities (the so-called informal economy).

The peripheries have turned into a ‘zone of storms’ with instability and permanent rebellion.

LOW-INTENSITY DEMOCRACY

Electoral democracy has become a farce and there must be an upswing in the struggle for the real democratisation of society.

Low-intensity democracy means people can vote but it is relatively unimportant.

This represents the failure of capitalism in the Global South which cannot offer anything other than abandoned rural areas and overcrowded urban slums.

In a recent blog, ‘Delinking and Degrowth’, Australian economist William Mitchell maintains that so-called free trade or global competitiveness is simply a way to channel surplus to the Global North.

Nations should rather use employment guarantees to achieve full employment and take work to their rural areas.

The comprador administration serves the interests of foreign capital and perpetuates the dependence on the Global North.
What is required is delinking for the Global South and degrowth for the Global North.

The ultimate challenge is to overcome the logic of capitalism while keeping the mode of production going.
 
DO WE EVEN HAVE CHOICES?

Despite the strategic importance of critical minerals on our continent, we are locked into the bottom of the global value chain. 

That the Global South is caught in a deliberate structural trap is emphasised by Tunisian intellectual Fadhel Kaboub in an interview ‘Africa is Designed to Stay Underdeveloped by Neo-Colonialism’.

The global system of extraction ensures we cannot invest in health, education, food, energy, manufacturing, etc.

We are to apparently remain a place for cheap raw materials.

Needless to say, these types of discussions are completely absent in the run-up to our national elections.

This speaks volumes about the limitations of Namibia’s political parties.

So, in the final analysis, Namibians should go and vote against the unbridled corruption.

However, they must also organise a general strike for a wealth tax. Only mass action will bring about fundamental change.
 

• * The authors are members of the Marxist Group of Namibia.