Civil Society in Namibia: History, Context and Possibilities (Part 2)

ANDRÉ DU PISANI WRITES:Actual political processes in Namibia are mostly very different from political life in many Western societies: yet, the language used to describe, express and consider the experiences of politics are the same everywhere.For historical reasons, nearly all societies of the non-Western world, as far as politics is concerned, use a Western language. It is a language which identifies states and civil societies, speaks of bureaucracies, political parties, political society, parliaments, ideologies, democracy, planning, public policy, interest mediation, and evaluates political systems in terms of democratic and authoritarian systems. Yet it is common knowledge that these words do not denote objects which behave in the same way as in Western societies, where this language originated.CIVIL SERVICE The Namibian bureaucracy or civil service equates to the classical Weberian logic and rules of impartiality, professionalism and rationalization. In important respects, the local civil service is profoundly neo-patrimonial, manifestly inefficient, non-transparent, and politicized to an unhealthy degree.While the operation of democracy does not necessarily mean a shared understanding of values and of inviolable rights of individuals or respect for minorities, and it can be argued that political institutions imported from the West have been introduced into a society that has older embedded forms of association and disassociation that are very different from the common individualistic forms of many contemporary Western democracies. The actual modes of operation, institutional culture and historical effect of those political institutions are often startlingly different.Even if Namibia has intellectual cultures of great antiquity and sophistication, these hardly feature centrally in the sphere of "politics" in the contemporary sense, therefore, the State relies on the language that comes from the West. However, over the medium-to longer-term, as these historical state trajectories and the human experiences associated with them come to move away from Western forms, inevitably new elements emerge.HISTORYAnalysis of politics, history and of civil society has to be comparative. The Namibian society faces large historical processes as problems which seem to be much more similar to what many Western societies faced in the nineteenth century – the re-organization of social life around a modern sovereign state, conflict generated by inequality and nascent forms of industrialization, low social cohesion, and contradictions that arise from the politics of nation-and state building, and from that of "national reconciliation".Add to this the questions: "Who is a Namibian?", "Who is a Namibian hero?", and "Who’s history counts?" Once these large historical and social processes dominated political thought from Machiavelli, through Hobbes, Locke, Marx, to Gramsci – now, most Western societies are grappling with a different magnitude of problems, particularly in this period of intellectual globalization and migration.For Namibia, it is extremely important to revisit early modern Western political thought, at least for the reason that the idea of civil society was fashioned by this tradition in all its theoretical complexity.PATRONISM AND STATE CAPTUREHistorical experience in Namibia over the past 27-years, shows that while the democratic impulse is still strong and invited democratic spaces do exist, public institutions and the State have not been immune to corrosive forms of undue influence from within and without, patron-client politics and forms of state capture.It is clear that the functioning of democracy and of a vibrant civil society requires more than legal artifice; these require sociological and historical conditions to operate and to take root. That leads to the further question about whether such structures of sociability can be fashioned by external actors, foreign political foundations, International Development Partners (ICPs) and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs). At the very least, it seems highly doubtful to this analyst.Notwithstanding the "politics of invented spaces" as practiced by the Affirmative Repositioning (AR) Movement and regular "illegal" land occupations in Namibia since 2014, civil society has a limited footprint in this country. One of the best illustrations of this has been the negligible impact that a range of civil society agencies had on the 2014 third amendment to the Namibian Constitution, amendments that were not widely discussed with citizens.Under the country’s second President Hifikepunye Pohamba (2005-15), war veterans, taxi drivers, "the children of the liberation struggle", and shebeen owners were the most vocal and staged major protests.CONSTRAINED INFLUENCEThe country has what I term a "constrained civil society", one that is unevenly diffused in the society. In some respects, the idea of civil society exists in a variety of contexts and is being kept alive by a range of agencies, often for their own reasons and justification.One such context is that of the "development profession". The small community of scholars, consultants, activists, and policy analysts that attempts to influence policy-making and the policy agenda in national government, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations has constructed a discourse around the role of civil society in the process of social, economic, and political change in the post-colony.Because of the influence of this community on foreign assistance priorities – which today encompasses issues of how political life is organized – it offers a space for both the reception of the idea of a Namibian civil society and its importance to foreign assistance and certain forms of social investment in the country.It is hardly surprising that critical scholars attempting to bridge the gap between political theory and development studies, have, in general, succeeded in holding multilateral aid agencies to account for their hypocrisy of their policy statements on civil society. The emptiness of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) throughout the 1980s, for example, have in the case of Zimbabwe, where "civil society actors" have been on the receiving end of State power and even state-sponsored terror after 1992, been premised on the notion of a vibrant Zimbabwean civil society. Political space for civil society has actually closed significantly in that country, while the WB and the IMF have regarded Zimbabwe as an open political space with a "neutral state", along the precepts of liberal political theory and neo-liberal political policy.

Civil Society in Namibia: History, Context and Possibilities (Part 2)

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Republikein 2026-01-28

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Civil Society in Namibia: History, Context and Possibilities (Part 2)

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