Mr. Joseph Kauandenge
THE Namibia Democratic Movement for Change Namibia DMC) takes strong exception to the rather ill-thought circular sent from the office of the Prime Minister to all Permanent Secretaries to freeze all entry posts in the civil service for the benefit of children of the liberation struggle as they are being called.
We should make it categorically very clear here that al- though we have sympathy for this childrens’ current conditions, we are nevertheless so gravely disappointed in the manner in which this whole issue has been dealt with by the current Swapo leaders.
Political survival antics should not cloud their sound judgment, as after all once elected they are supposed to serve all Namibians and not only a selected few. It is unheard off that in an independent Namibia where many sacrificed their lives for the noble goals of independence, the Swapo party has to deploy reverse discrimination 20 years down the road of our independence.
Namibia produces thousands of young Namibians every year with university degrees who can hardly be accommodated by our job market. Now because many of their parents were not involved in the liberation struggle they now have to hear that with their hard earned qualifications, they have to wait until those kids are given employment before they can be considered for employment in the public service.
With the questions of effective service delivery in the public service that is already lacking, and with many of these kids not having completed even grade 10, we are in fact adding more chaos and ineffective service delivery. Period!
We should add here that such a circular will not stand the test of a constitutional challenge at all. This is a clear demonstration that our leaders in the Swapo party have totally lost it, instead of getting to the root of the problem which is to tell this youngsters that they should stand up and fend for themselves like all other Namibians, they are in fact busy with crisis management that clearly borders on buying political support without looking to the bigger picture of how this will affect Namibia’s state coffers in the long run.
Namibians of all political persuations fought in their own way for the attainment of independence, the politics of entitlement so openly advocated by those kids and their backers clearly defeat the whole process of why we liberated ourselves in the first place. We sincerely hope that Swapo will revisit this rather pathetic and shortsighted decision in the interest of co-existence as Namibians.
Furthermore we should add our voice on the ever increasing anti-democratic actions between Swapo and the RDP. It is regrettable that most of our leaders in the Swapo party are paying lip service to the whole question of tolerance, in fact they are sending mixed signals to their supporters.
On the one hand they say when pressed by circumstances that their supporters should leave RDP alone to campaign freely, while when taking podiums what comes out of their mouths is more petrol that ignite more fires.
We surely cannot stand idle and allow two political parties to spoil Namibia’s image internationally and engulf the whole country in fire. It is time that someone should take leadership on this front and it is just so regrettable, disappointing that both RDP and Swapo leaders claim to have brought democracy to this country, but their actions on the ground clearly defeat this claim.
Why these two parties cannot tolerate each other is beyond comprehension and other parties that are not party to this charade are now wondering where to. It is thus clear that the parties that have been left inside the country are the true champions of our democracy for they have perfected the art of co-existence which is the cornerstone of democracy,as you hardly will hear UDF, DTA or NUDO members fighting one another.
Just maybe Swapo and RDP can learn a lesson from this two parties how they managed to co-exist, despite their differences.
We would like to call upon the Swapo and RDP leaders to allow Namibian people to deliver that judgment of who will be the winner, let us allow the ballot paper to determine who will be in government next year, and let stones and traditional weapons not be the ultimate winners in this democratic process.
