Parliament in space and time: The tyranny of description over explanation

The lack of sophistication in our politics has led to judgement based on what one sees. Eyes alone are not enough. In politics, eyes may see only what has been decided. Stories on the eight o'clock news are a selection from the many collected. Someone decided which story is covered and which is ignored; what appears on the front page and which picture accompanies it. Sophistication is needed — beyond descriptions of what is shown, particularly when dealing with the politics of a nation.

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, in his ethnographic medical classifications, 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 abducted from South Africa in 1810 and paraded across exhibition halls in London and Paris because of what whites saw as “huge buttocks”, this descriptive, exploitative framework had been planted centuries earlier.

This descriptive tyranny continued after colonialism. In 2007, speaking at a Senegalese university, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared: “The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has not entered into history enough.” The Gambia, despite being one of Africa's most beautiful countries, has been internationally described — as a 2024 World Bank study confirmed — as a haven for sex tourism, without explaining how European women exploit systemic poverty by purchasing younger local men.

After independence, African elites mimicked colonial mannerisms, adopting the very descriptive tools of their colonisers, as Frantz Fanon explained 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 distinctive regime of violence characterised by theatrical power displays and institutional excess.

We see both inheritances 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 within our current space and time.

The current descriptive exercise around Parliament provides no context and suggests that Parliament is an assembly line in a fish factory. It is not explained 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 per year. Three decades later, between 100 and 200 colonial laws remain active on our books. In 2021, when President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah sat as a Member of Parliament, only three to four laws were passed, despite SWAPO holding an overwhelming majority.

The descriptive discourse does not explain that when output was high, it was often because bills were rushed and bulldozed on account of numbers, not superior logic, thinking and debate.

Passing laws is one thing; putting them into operation is another. The public is unaware that 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. For 10 years, the Whistleblower Protection Act remains unimplemented.

There are only six bills before the National Assembly, yet government sits on more than 30 passed laws. If the six are passed, they may join the dustbin — probably for another 10 years.

It is therefore important to challenge the descriptive crowd and provide a sound understanding of space and time in our politics. Political behaviours, power dynamics and institutional developments are shaped, restricted and defined by specific geographical locations and historical contexts.

The current space and time mean the ruling party can no longer act with absolute impunity. Using the outputs 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 when the reality is that MPs are rejecting old methods that reduced Parliament to an extension of its musical group. It has resorted to recruiting society to sympathise with its descriptive narratives.

Inside Parliament, with few exceptions, it has not deployed its best brains to advance and win debates through superior logic. The only solution is bulldozing and voting. Relatedly, SWAPO's parliamentary leadership has responded to unfamiliar robust debate by using police and personal bodyguards to harass and intimidate MPs, turning up the heat and exposing its ineptitude. This is precisely the mutation Mbembe describes.

The party appears unaware of the consequences. Using bodyguards to stifle debate and harass MPs confirms the victims as fighters for the masses, while SWAPO emerges as a new oppressor. Constant reliance on voting, bulldozing and buying cheap 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 the ruling elite unable to accept the politics of space and time.

SWAPO has lost another battle at the sophisticated intellectual level. Its attempts to force MPs — who wear local clothes made by Namibian designers such as Ingo Shingenge — to wear European dress codes expose it as an agent of European modernity at the expense of local and African arts. 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 such exhibit.

With this explanation, there should be no sympathy for SWAPO's crocodile tears, also spearheaded by President Nandi-Ndaitwah, that laws are not being passed. The three laws passed in 2025 are exactly the same as the three laws passed in 2021, when Nandi-Ndaitwah was an MP. There are more laws passed yet remaining unimplemented than the six laws under consideration in Parliament.

It is SWAPO's parliamentary leadership inability to understand the politics of time and space that best explains the fiascos in our Parliament. A descriptive tyranny that fails to locate Parliament within the current space and time demonstrates a mutation of Galen and Sarkozy's paternalistic mindset.

There exists an open window for SWAPO. It requires an understanding and acceptance of space and time — something that appears challenging for 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 distinctions.

An intellectual gap must be filled. As such, this article will be followed by three others aimed at demystifying parliamentary discourse and undermining the dominant descriptive narratives. The second instalment will examine the institutional dynamics of Parliament, looking at fundamental weaknesses and how the legislature is incapable of carrying the political weight of the current space and time.

Prof. Dr Job Shipululo Amupanda is the Activist-in-Chief of the Affirmative Repositioning movement, Member of Parliament and an associate scholar at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.