Don’t worry, your president is coming!

Although you lead a successful life, your extended family makes it hard to enjoy the fruits of your labour. Most of them are unemployed or unemployable. Since your parents died, they all depend on you. This is the third year since you finished university. You are still looking for a job after attending countless interviews.As a teenager, you left this country to fight for freedom. By 1989 when you returned, you had two kids who were later joined by an additional three. At the end of this year, you will go into retirement after turning 60. With only two of your five children gainfully employed, the longevity of your pension is predictable - more so given your 12 grandchildren.Since the Ramatex garment factory closed, you moved back to the village under the care of your only son. It has now been two years since your son was retrenched following the Covid-19 pandemic. He is at home helpless and hopeless.As a police officer, you have been waiting for promotion for the past six years. Others at your level got promoted.Although you run a successful business, you remain concerned about the needs of many who constantly and persistently ask for your help.A civil servant for decades, you have helplessly watched how your developmental suggestions are ignored by your bosses to maintain a system of corruption and looting public resources. Because you need the job to sustain your family, you helplessly watch things degenerate.You are reading this in a foreign country where you work far from your family and friends. You had no choice but to leave the country.Unfulfilled promisesThese are your stories as Namibians. Stories representing the unfulfilled promises of freedom and an incapable state that abandoned its interventionist orientation. Stories of a suffering society with an uncertain future. Indeed, a society whose identity is unfathomable, in leaders’ minds, outside occidental thought frameworks.There are many reasons for the above. The liberating generation was generally unprepared on the specificities of addressing the national question in a post-colonial society. Where they had some ideas, they were outmanoeuvred by the colonising power at settlement negotiation tables.Their gain from this table were political offices and permission to declare public holidays and compose the national anthem. The economy remained in the hands of those who designed its mechanical operations in 1896. These types of deals were predicted by Martinique revolutionary intellectual Frantz Fanon in 1961. He profoundly submitted that freedom fighters mobilise “the people with slogans of independence, and for the rest leave it to future events... [because they were] completely ignorant of the economy of their own country. This economy has always developed outside the limits of their knowledge... After independence [these freedom fighters] reduced in numbers and without capital, which refused to follow the path of revolution [fell] into deplorable stagnation and were held in check by colonial domination”.It is as if Fanon, in 1961, was looking at our country in 2023.Development economic history teaches us that successful post-colonial developmental trajectories were always accompanied by a competent interventionist state. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and other Asian tigers did not develop through songs and handclapping but through a strong, capable interventionist state defining the developmental priorities and trajectories.Weak and incapableLeaders of these nations had ideological clarity and were decisive in directing and mobilising their nations behind the developmental vision and agenda. There is no list of strong, capable states that includes Namibia. Ours is a weak and incapable state led by the ungifted amongst us. This is what accounts for our economic development deficit.Our result of an economic development deficit is poverty, unemployment and inequality. At 33, Namibia is a woman with close to three million children from different fathers (heterogeneous character) having completed matric (political freedom) but could not proceed to university (economic freedom).Despite her natural external and internal beauty (natural resources), she goes in survival mode and gradually loses her ability to dream, aspire and rationalise beyond surviving (general state of despondency and directionlessness). There are those amongst her children who refuse to surrender and settle for survivalism.Indeed, there exists a generation of young men and women with talent and energy, believing that a capable interventionist state to achieve economic freedom is possible.In their graves since 1905 (Hendrik Witbooi), 1908 (Nehale lyaMpingana), 1961 (Frantz Fanon) and 1987 (Thomas Sankara), our ancestors marvel at this generation seeking to break the continued colonial chains for African subjectivities and value systems. I lead and belong to this generation.I spent the past 33 years either receiving education or fighting for economic freedom and social justice. With other activists, we took this fight to the doorsteps of our country’s highest offices. This led to our suspension and expulsion from the ruling party in 2014 and 2015 respectively.That a herd led by presidents Hifikepunye Pohamba and Hage Geingob were unsettled and had to act ruthlessly against a 27-year-old is telling.This relentless activism led to Namibia’s first public policy agreement between the state and a youth non-state actor when we met President Geingob and his senior Cabinet colleagues at State House in 2015. There will be time to detail and enumerate our developmental achievements over the past 12 years of radical activism.Of importance is the lessons from our experience that for the magnitude of the problems our country faces, the conclusive solution is taking over the highest office in our country - the president.Revolutionary leadershipOur country’s highest office desperately needs revolutionary leadership with necessary testicular fortitude to deliver a strong, capable interventionist state. In 1983, at the age of 33, Africa’s greatest revolutionary Thomas Sankara became the president of Burkina Faso.He transformed his country’s politics, society and economy. In 1987, colonial forces with local stooges assassinated him. He was 37. This is the same year I was born.Following next year&#039;s presidential elections, after you elect me as Namibia’s fourth president, I will be 37. Sankara’s sunset will be our sunrise.Sankara will rise again in Namibia in 2024.As he told us, “while revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas”. I will be on the ballot to fulfil the unfulfilled promises of liberation. Ours is about building a strong, capable interventionist state to fight poverty, unemployment and inequality. To lead a conscious people who will not kneel before any outsiders but firmly and fearlessly control their economy with high spirits.Ours is to remove our people from a bottomless pit they are surrendered into by the current regime. I know your conditions, fears and aspirations as individuals and as a collective. The purpose of this text is to tell you this: Don’t worry, your president is coming.** Dr Job Shipululo Amupanda is a former mayor of Windhoek and the activist-in-chief of the Affirmative Repositioning movement. He is an aspiring 2024 presidential candidate.

Don’t worry, your president is coming!

Comments

Namibian Sun 2025-05-07

Please login to leave a comment

Don’t worry, your president is coming!

Comments

Namibian Sun 2025-05-07

Please login to leave a comment

Login