EDITORIAL: Count your blessings, too many can't

Namibians have much to be grateful for. Take the weather alone: lovely long summers, cosy short winters. When temperatures barely dip below zero, we have heaters, warm clothes, thick blankets. And that is just the beginning.

But we are speaking, as we so often do, about the minority.

Three children, the oldest perhaps twelve, the youngest eight, dressed in threadbare clothes, barefoot, dusty, on a briskly cool Sunday afternoon.

Walking through one of those suburbs where a single pothole triggers an avalanche of social media outrage: fury at the municipality that ensures residents with flush toilets, high walls and security cameras rarely suffer more than an occasional power outage on the coldest day of the year.

These children are heading either to their corner on Sam Nujoma Drive to beg post-hearty-Sunday-lunch Namibians for a dollar or two, or to a nearby bridge, which, each winter, is home.

They are not anomalies. They are the visible edge of a majority for whom the bare basics – shelter, warmth, a plate of food, a safe place to sleep – are far out of reach.

Namibia is a country of extraordinary inequality, dressed up in extraordinary beauty.

This winter, however brief and mild it may be, spare a thought for those children. Look past the walls. For too many Namibians, daily struggles will always outweigh daily blessings.

And perhaps, beyond sparing a thought, we must begin asking harder questions. What does it say of us that children still sleep under bridges in a country that prides itself on peace, stability and progress? That we have normalised small hands tapping on car windows at traffic lights – not as a national emergency, but as part of the daily scenery?