EDITORIAL: Why Swapo food handouts were wrong
Swapo, a party that promised to take care of what President Hage Geingob now calls the ‘Namibian House’, on Sunday hit a new low when it delivered lunch packs to scavengers at the Kupferberg dumpsite.
A revolutionary movement that delivered independence with the promise of turning around the socio-economic conditions of the people is now handing out salads in plates to the hungry – and leaving with a trail of nothingness.
Embarrassingly, the media was invited to witness this occasion of ‘generosity’. To invite the media to the feedlot, Swapo was sure this was great news worth filling newspaper column inches and TV broadcasts.
Then, lo and behold, the hungry men and women at the dumpsite were made to literally sing for their supper – and raise their weak fists in the air to salute the food saviours.
We said after the 2019 election, in which the party lost its two-thirds majority, it had four years to self-correct or face further humiliation in subsequent elections.
If delivering one-day lunch parcels and leaving the structural problems of hunger and poverty unscathed is Swapo’s definition of self-correcting, we are in trouble.
There is simply no time to remain drunk on the fermentation of old liberation struggle stories that, 32 years later, have lost both their colour and taste. The 2019 election taught us that.
A revolutionary movement that delivered independence with the promise of turning around the socio-economic conditions of the people is now handing out salads in plates to the hungry – and leaving with a trail of nothingness.
Embarrassingly, the media was invited to witness this occasion of ‘generosity’. To invite the media to the feedlot, Swapo was sure this was great news worth filling newspaper column inches and TV broadcasts.
Then, lo and behold, the hungry men and women at the dumpsite were made to literally sing for their supper – and raise their weak fists in the air to salute the food saviours.
We said after the 2019 election, in which the party lost its two-thirds majority, it had four years to self-correct or face further humiliation in subsequent elections.
If delivering one-day lunch parcels and leaving the structural problems of hunger and poverty unscathed is Swapo’s definition of self-correcting, we are in trouble.
There is simply no time to remain drunk on the fermentation of old liberation struggle stories that, 32 years later, have lost both their colour and taste. The 2019 election taught us that.
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Namibian Sun
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