Swapo 'architects of poverty', says LPM

The Landless Peoples Movement (LPM) says it will register as a political party next year to end the “one-party state” that has been crystallised with successive overwhelming Swapo electoral victories and a crumbling and fragmented opposition.

“This is a free country and by next year February we will have an important announcement to make,” was all that LPM leader Bernadus Swartbooi was prepared to say at this stage. He added: “There is a need to change the one-party state that we are in because the one-party state has destroyed this country faster than Zanu-PF has destroyed Zimbabwe.” Swartbooi said it is “warm, very warm outside Swapo”.

“You do not need to feel ashamed over theft or corruption, or ashamed over poor service delivery. We are not fighting for seats. We are fighting for an alternative Namibia, a different Namibia,” he added.

The LPM accused former liberation movements in southern Africa of having destroyed their respective countries while following the same script of bad governance, mismanagement, corruption, authoritarianism, stifling of democracy nationally and at inter-party level, and lack of service delivery.

Swartbooi added that the failure of the former liberation movements are further manifested in failed economic policies, “recycling of idiot after idiot and the promotion of those facing corruption charges”.

“It is a southern African thing; it is not unique to any particular country,” he said at a press briefing on Wednesday. The LPM leaders have branded Swapo as “architects of poverty”, saying “oligarchs” facing corruption charges have been elected into some of the party's top structures – openly referring to Tobie Aupindi – and added that many who have been elected to these structures have never taken a stance on anything.





“This is how African politics is,” said Swartbooi. “The least talented and the least able end up with the highest possible responsibilities in societies. That is why African and Namibian societies cannot transform as per the aspirations enunciated in the constitution because the least able are also the least literate.”



Issues of concern

The LPM is accusing the ruling party of not exerting enough effort to fast-track the land reform process and, among other things, not fully exploring the possibility of expropriation “in the interest of justice and compensation”.

It criticised the fact that the Ministry of Land Reform had awarded waivers for 600 commercial farms instead of having bought these for resettlement purposes.

“Why have these lands not been bought? Simple; the architects of poverty have their plans executed, which is to keep the landless people landless,” said Swartbooi.

The group further bemoaned squatter camps and slums that have grown bigger than the substantive towns in which they are mushrooming, saying this has not been the case even during the apartheid period.

“In the time of the white illegal occupational regime, I am not praising them but merely doing a historical analysis, hunger and the lack of food that we see today was not there,” Swartbooi said.

The LPM further criticised the fact that groups indigenous to areas where among others B2Gold, Husab and Namdeb De Beers are mining do not hold shareholding in such companies as compensation for loss of access to those lands.

It said poor farming communities are being dislodged and forced into informal urban areas to make way for mining and other individual interests.

“The leadership crisis is one in which leaders have never been able to address the question of wealth creation and prosperity. In fact, they have actually impoverished society while they became richer and richer,” Swartbooi commented.

He said government's acknowledgement of poor implementation of its programmes is a failure to govern because an “unelected bureaucracy often is the agent through which the elected politicians institutionalise corruption and self-enrichment”.

Swartbooi said the result is a diminishing capacity in state institutions to effect change and a “complete refusal” from institutions like the Anti-Corruption Commission to deal with issues of corruption, while the Office of the Prosecutor-General fails to execute prosecutions.



Development agencies – 'not'

LPM went on to lambast foreign development agencies such as Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Frederick Ebert Foundation for rejecting its requests for assistance for workshops and leadership training.

“Some of these institutions proclaim to come from democratic countries and are there to deepen and expand democracy, except when they come to southern African countries where there are resources and where their national governments have a particular policy towards ruling parties,” Swartbooi said.

He said Namibia is not reflective of a true democratic dispensation because one party dominates the political landscape and where most parties – including the ruling party – are in essence ethnic, or tribal, organisations.



Buying votes

Swartbooi and fellow LPM leader Henny Seibeb further alleged that delegates at the recently concluded Swapo congress were bribed.

“We know who was given money and by whom. We also know the budget that was set aside by some other people to finance some of these outcomes,” they alleged.

They would not, however, divulge any further details.

They also alleged that a small group of Swapo members had travelled throughout the country to bribe people with veteran status and other national resources to frustrate LPM's campaigning for support.

Again, they would not divulge any names, saying only that they would expose these at a time of their own choosing “for optimal impact”.

CATHERINE SASMAN