Adapt or die

As the leadership of six former southern African liberation movements gathered in Windhoek this week to strengthen ties, analysts painted a bleak picture for their future survival, amid growing gerontocracy and so-called liberation capital being wasted.Ruling parties Swapo, South Africa's African National Congress (ANC), Zimbabwe's Zanu-PF, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) of Tanzania, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and Frelimo of Mozambique met this week seemingly to bolster their waning fortunes. The average age of their party presidents is 66.In Namibia, Swapo, however, still commands huge support across the country and there is no glaring picture suggesting that its support is waning compared to its sister parties in the region.Political commentator Ndumba Kamwanyah said gerontocracy - where an ageing leadership continues to cling to power - is holding back Africa, and it will serve Swapo well, if it rethinks this approach.“That is our problem. Let us be honest, the older we are getting the energy declines. You might have good ideas but the energy level might be an impediment, especially when it comes to running a country or being in a ministerial position. We have seen other countries like Botswana and Rwanda with youthful cabinets, bringing new ideas,” he said. Botswana president Mokgweetsi Masisi is 57 years old, while Rwanda president Paul Kagame is 61.Kamwanyah also believes that the poor performance of former liberation movements that are now in power, such as Swapo, can no longer be sugar-coated.These failures are so serious that even party loyalists can no longer be fooled, he added. “We are seeing that there is now a trend that even the liberation movements that are now parties are divided. In the ANC, we saw Julius Malema (then ANC Youth League leader) starting to question their leaders because they are not delivering. “In Namibia we saw Team Swapo and Team Harambee, but also the questioning by the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) movement. All those are signs that liberation credentials are waning down and can no longer be relied. People are starting to assert themselves and say, 'hey this is not what we fought for'. They are being questioned,” he said. Liberation currency dwindlesAccording to Professor Henning Melber the first struggle generation is approaching their biological expiry date, which was demonstrated when Emmerson Mnangagwa replaced Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwean head of state last year. “In Namibia, only a handful of the first generation, in particular Hage Geingob and Nangolo Mbumba, remain in charge. The stalwarts have increasingly been replaced by the second struggle generation - those who left (the country) since the mid-1970s. “They can hardly claim to have liberated Namibia, most of them were students at the time and not yet in the upper echelons of the Swapo hierarchy. The 'heroic narratives' sound less convincing when they are preached by the Sofia Shaningwas and Katrina Hanse-Himarwas, and others who made careers because of their mimicry,” Melber said.“Geingob already changed the narrative from 'Swapo is the family' to the 'Namibian house', which is a significant shift in the dominant (populist) mantra. This in itself suggests that the liberation currency is not any longer of the value it had been before.”At the same time the people's patience has run out with liberation movements, who have after decades failed to deliver on their promises, Melber said.He said lack of delivery in terms of socio-economic improvements for ordinary people and the repressive nature of governance in some countries, has caused a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction. “The organisations (former liberation movements) lost credibility and 'social capital' - trust they originally had because of the role they played in the struggle for self-determination. But the kind of self-determination is one where the leaders of these organisations determine the fate of the people, and the results have not been very convincing,” Melber said.According to him the rise of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in Zimbabwe, which emerged in the late 1990s from the ranks of the trade unions, was the writing on the wall.“But in other countries such opposition has not been formed. In Angola the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) is regaining some influence, and in Mozambique, Renamo, is trying with some limited success to reinvent itself. “They have no regional strongholds with local loyalties. While South Africa has a long history of political competition, going back to the early days of the formation of organisations fighting apartheid minority rule, such traditions never existed in Namibia,” Melber said.He believes that the decision by the United Nations to recognise Swapo officially as “the sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people” was a most undemocratic move, which also infected the minds of the people. “If you were not Swapo, you were not Namibian, which had disastrous impacts on the undemocratic attitudes cultivated ever since then,” he said.Generational divideMelber pointed out that South African opposition party the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is a symptom of a generational divide, which is emerging gradually in Namibia, but in contrast there has never been any meaningful opposition in Namibia.According to him the credo that 'Swapo is the people and the people is Swapo' still remains to some extent effective, in particular in the northern rural areas, although some, in the absence of meaningful alternatives, remain loyal, but grudgingly so. “But also this is seemingly changing in other regions of the country, which feel neglected and without any benefits from so-called liberation, in particular the Landless People's Movement (LPM) is significant evidence of this.”JEMIMA BEUKES

Adapt or die

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Namibian Sun 2024-12-05

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Adapt or die

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Namibian Sun 2024-12-05

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