In defence of Dingara: A response to Professor Diescho

Hey Joe! I take issue with your write-up on member of parliament Elifas Dingara's proposition of giving each Namibian N$1 million, which you treat with a grain of salt and trash as a pipe dream.

You open by citing the black book according to Deuteronomy 15:11: "For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore, I command you, you shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor in your land".

The context in which you use this biblical verse is unfortunately problematic. You intend to teach that the poor will always infest the universe, and there is thus no need to contemplate programmes aiming to eradicate poverty, safe for administering them as leftovers from the rich.

You continue with your grain-of-salt treatment: "... the authors of the admittedly nice-sounding... oozy proposal lack the basic understanding of how the economy is constituted and functions in any society. Poverty cannot be ended by making every person in the land... a millionaire... even Jesus of Nasareth or Prophet Muhammad... who were seized with the mission of making the world better, did not advocate that governments should make all their citizens un-poor with free money."

From the outset, you ascribe, through the passage you cite, that Jesus was or is content with the longevity of poverty, for after all, there shall always be poor people.

Then you bestow upon economics heavenly perfection, as if economics were not designed by fallible humans, the very humans who would drain the state of resources through hoarding for their own gain and dishing out to kith and kin.

Humans designed economics, and humans are not infallible. Therefore, economics is not infallible.

Broken systems

This reality thus calls bluff to rugged capitalism, which holds that: "If it ain’t broken, don't fix it".

Because it is broken, and even more, because the advocates of this philosophy persist in order to protect their riches, stolen from the poor.

Suffice to say, Joe, that the poor you allude to in the book you cite, are not God-intended.

They are poor because they were dispossessed by the rich. And we should not hide behind clichés positing the perceived erratic nature of Marxist Leninist.

Man-made problem

The truth is that, in the context of Namibia, Nama and Ovaherero were killed, stampeded into the wilderness, and dispossessed, not by communists but by German might through the Genocide Wars that left them robbed of 46 million hectares of land and over half a million cattle. This mayhem was openly supported by Americans at the time through public advocacy by their president, Theodore Roseveldt, in 1900. A story for another day.

This is why I find your citation problematic, Joe, for it implies that the poor are God-made when they are man-made through dispossession, and this poverty is exacerbated intentionally by rulers of the contemporary African state.

This is where Dingara's introspection enters the arena of marketable ideas and becomes relevant.

While MP Dingara is not unmindful of the economic construct of the morden African state and the extent to which its rulers manage the business of the state adversely, he does not say, "take from the rich and give to the poor". He says, let us, for once, think away from the so-called conventional model by apologists of capitalist economics', whom you seem to protect with your rationale, Joe. Dingara says, let us try and find resources to uplift society by giving everyone a million dollars so that they exercise their choice, their rightful power to run their lives, this time around with tangible resources at their disposal.

And this reminds me of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who once said: "I know no safe depository of the aspirations of society but the people themselves. And if we find them not enlightened enough to exercise their authority with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take away their authority but to inform their discretion."

Unlike you, Joe, I feel that instead of erratically assuming that someone would bury a million dollars in a kambashu, I would inform his discretion so that he can exercise his authority over his resources with wholesome discretion.

Be this as it may, Joe sarcastically castigates Dingara and accuses him of spearheading the campaign to give Namibians millions to "bury in their huts", when he knows that such a proposition is untenable.

In the final analysis, we as academics and scholars remain ambivalent when the powerful, the rich and their experts walk off with state resources through graft and non-compliance with taxes and municipal bills. The moment that someone like Dingara posits a thought that considers empowering the poor and downtrodden, we invoke all academic discourse to prove that such an idea is not in tandem with the construct of the state and not in conformity with economic wisdom. And, therefore, not permissible.

The Namibian state has been caged into a national development model driven and controlled by chosen entrepreneurs and preferred political principals bent on retaining exclusive control of national resources for themselves, their families, and close associates.

Let us dare to contemplate invoking a forensic audit on who controls the economy and economic development resources in order to establish to our satisfaction who has abused national resources for 33 years.

Short end of the stick

And the moment that a Dingara makes a proposal, it is wrong, for according to you, Joe, even Jesus of Nasareth and Prophet Muhammad did not give orders for states to make citizens un-poor by giving money to each other. Yet this model becomes moderate in thought when the state is rendered un-rich by its rulers and its intelligentsia.

This model of exclusive control of economic resources by the chosen economic crown holders has cost the state and the nation dearly, pushed the economy to its knees, and brought the nation into economic disarray.

Our education and our health have stagnated because they lack resources, cutting-edge knowledge, professional commitment, and the zeal to re-engineer revolutionary development planning.

And our leaders have not been too helpful.

Our national foreign debt has escalated to over one hundred billion dollars and is ever-escalating with no recovery model in sight.

But each time someone talks of giving cash to the poor, charges of potential abuse are invoked.

We need to review the premises upon which we have based our planning for national economic development, and continuing to uphold non-existent economic fairness, will not do the trick.

Our experience shows that the large majority in our nation continues to hold onto the shorter end of the economic stick.

We must contemplate a model that places cash in the hands of all citizens instead of the chosen few, who abuse this power, while others are denied the same right on the presumed premise that they will abuse the money or stash millions in boxes in kambashus, as Professor Diescho suggests.

Let us hear MP Dingara in parliament out. The litany we have been forced to swallow from experts and economic model proponents to date did not serve the nation and was hardly rooted in honourable motives.

Bob Kandetu, Katutura