THE year 2010 marks 50 years of Swapo and 20 years of Independence. Many positive appraisals were made on these occasions. But there is also reason enough to take stock more critically, putting an emphasis on what has not been accomplished. This personal summary articulates the disappointments and frustrations over what can be considered the limits to liberation.

A trust betrayed

Namibia's decolonisation process was part of an official United Nations responsibility. The dispute emerging since the late 1940s over the mandated territory resulted in an active role of the UN. It institutionalised the UN Council for Namibia and the UN Institute for Namibia, guided by the understanding that the continued South African occupation of the territory was tantamount to "a trust betrayed".

Not least because of its decision to ultimately also resort to armed resistance, Swapo managed to rally the support of large parts of Namibia's colonised majority behind its slogan 'Solidarity, Freedom, Justice'. The backing by the majority of UN member states from the non-aligned movement and the Soviet bloc consolidated its status as the exclusive agency of anti-colonial resistance. By the mid-1970s Swapo was through a resolution of the UN General Assembly declared "the sole and authentic representative of the Namibian people". This monopoly in representation encouraged an understanding that Swapo is the people and the people are Swapo.

Swapo's Political Programme, adopted by the movement's Central Committee 1976 in Lusaka, stated among its tasks: "To unite all Namibian people, particularly the working class, the peasantry and progressive intellectuals into a vanguard party capable of safeguarding national independence and of building a classless, non-exploitative society based on the ideas and principles of scientific socialism." It further elaborated that, "the economic reconstruction in a free, democratic and united Namibia will have, as its motive force, the establishment of a classless society. The social justice and progress for all is the governing idea behind every Swapo policy decision."

Measured against this claim, and the fact that the trust betrayed by South Africa was transferred by popular vote in the UN-supervised elections of November 1989 to the new government formed by Swapo at Independence, it merits the question to which extent the trust as defined in this programme of Swapo has been taken care of through the political forces - still to a large extent represented by the same persons who were adopting the document - in control over the sovereign Namibian state.

IDEALS AND REALITIES

Not that those observers with some common sense really believed in the stereotype, pseudo-socialist ideological antiques, which the Swapo representatives abroad used in their efforts to garner the support from the Soviet regime and its allies. Brian Urquhart, who was involved as UN Under Secretary General for Special Political Affairs in the negotiations for Namibia's independence, dryly commented in his biography 'A Life in Peace and War', published prior to Namibian Independence: "I doubted if Nujoma would know a Marxist-Leninist idea if he met one in the street, but like most liberation leaders, he would take help from wherever he could get it."

Many activists nonetheless wanted to believe in the political aims declared by those, who claimed to represent the "wretched of the earth". Frantz Fanon, who published the manifesto with this programmatic title (borrowed from the Communist International hymn) at a time when Swapo was founded, warned already in a chapter entitled "the pitfalls of national consciousness" against the new nationalist elite now occupying the commanding heights of the state power to serve only their own interests. Swapo's trajectory since then is a case in point, including the willingness to commit human rights violations in its own ranks if needed to protect the vested interests of the hierarchy in control over the exile faction.

Figures speak a sobering language concerning the social realities today: Twenty years into Independence, Namibia ranks still among the countries with the highest discrepancies in the distribution of wealth in the world. As an UNDP-affiliated economist concluded in a 2007 published report with reference to the trends prevailing, "over time income poverty appears to be decreasing while human poverty is increasing". Contrasted with the statements quoted from Swapo's Political Programme, this must be another country than the one, the movement - guided by "solidarity, freedom, justice" - wanted to lead "towards the abolition of all forms of exploitation of man by man".

EXCLUSIVITY VS INCLUSIVITY

As analysed by André du Pisani in a chapter to a just published book on the 'Postcolonial Dynamics of Social Structure in Namibia', such "articulation of nationalism operated as a rhetorical device, casting Swapo in the role of 'revolutionary agent', bent on reconfiguring the socio-economic and political landscape" - only that the reconfiguration of the socio-economic landscape, which was based on the control over the political commanding heights of the newly proclaimed Namibian state, was through the vehicles of 'Affirmative Action' (AA) and 'Black Economic Empowerment' (BEE). A redistributive strategy based on the cooptation of a new elite into the old socio-economic structures. As also emphasised by Du Pisani, 'national reconciliation' of such a class character "is an elite discourse bent on maintaining the legitimacy of the state and responding to the inherent contradictions that characterise Swapo's anti-colonial discourse".

In contrast to the past promises, the new terminology by which the disappointed people responded to the sobering realities includes reference to the "fat cats" as a new species. A political and bureaucratic class uses its access to the country's natural wealth to appropriate public goods and state property for private self-enrichment. Legitimacy for such appropriation strategy was cloaked into a nationalist discourse, which operated through an aggressively moulded kind of 'patriotic history'. It supported the erstwhile liberation movement's claim as the only legitimate political force representing "the" Namibian people.

Swapo henceforth made no distinction between party, government and state. Ever since Independence it stressed the notions of peace and stability and paid lip service to democracy. Interestingly enough, the terms justice and equality never featured prominently (if at all) in the official nomenclature since being in political control over the state affairs. National reconciliation became the programmatic slogan for a cooptation strategy, which was based on the structural legacy of a settler colonial minority rule and the corresponding property relations. Swapo's strategy was tantamount to an elite pact based on its role as a 'cultural entrepreneur', which - again in the words of Du Pisani - "attempted to 'reinvent' a historical communality and continuity among the Namibian people(s) and projected a common destiny into the future".

CLASS INTERESTS

Volker Winterfeldt offers in a chapter to the same volume from which André du Pisani was quoted arguments for the need to apply a more rigorous class analysis. As he diagnoses: "The social space occupied by postcolonial elites, blackoisie and their white counterparts are worlds apart from the location of the ordinary African urban dweller, and worlds apart from the communal locale of subsistence agriculture. Their worlds are divided by social distance in absolute terms. The occasionally addressed phenomenon of the 'extreme social divide' denotes the wide social and cultural gap between poverty and wealth, real and perceived."

A particular phenomenon is the rent-seeking nature of the new black class in the making, which is a blend of political office bearers and entrepreneurs. These are more so "tenderpreneurs", who lack substantial elements of the classic features of a bourgeoisie. To that extent, their strategies for profit maximisation are more of a parasitic nature and not oriented - like a "patriotic" bourgeoisie would be - towards a strategy of long-term investment into productive sectors for further accumulation of capital. Instead they use access to the state coffers for their self-enrichment strategy at the expense of the public purse. According to a government official, himself a beneficiary of this form of redistribution, politics and economics are bedfellows and not about social reconstruction. He was quoted in a recent article as saying: "BEE is not about empowering certain groups, it is about empowering individuals who have business ideas and need information and capital to take off".

In a similar selective fashion, which smacks more of own class interests than concepts of equality and redistribution, the government's land policy has for two decades mainly sought to satisfy the appetite of the new black elite for securing their own private farms. The government has wasted time on at best half-hearted and half-baked, lukewarm fiddling with the matter. Land became as much a natural resource for individual acquisition by a new political class and its allies as the other natural wealth, be it for commercial farming or for the use of protected parks and reserves for tourism enterprises or other forms of utilisation for own gains. The most recent evidence is the currently discussed Land Bill, which according to the analysis by Wolfgang Werner "does not introduce any innovation, although this is absolutely necessary in view (sic) the 'land grabs' that have also affected Namibia. Without improved accountability and transparency towards land right holders, people in communal areas will be vulnerable to the predations of international investors and their local allies."

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

The recent inner-Namibian debate around a Basic Income Grant (BIG) stands for a significant symbolical discourse in terms of social policy priorities under the current government. When President Hifikepunye Pohamba delivered his State of the Nation address in Parliament earlier this year, he dismissed BIG as a form of exploitation of those who earn their living through work, while their taxes would be used as payouts for others. Adding insult to injury, the trade union umbrella body NUNW announced out of the blue in July that it had with immediate effect abandoned the BIG coalition. The move was widely seen as a sign of loyalty to the President's dismissal of the initiative.

The NUNW President cited in a press conference a lack of creative ideas to address poverty as the reason for this move and stated: "We are sincere in our belief that there's serious need for poverty alleviation in this country. We believe that the coalition's idea is good but not the best. We're striving for the best." He further emphasised the need to reproduce wealth, which in his view would be almost impossible if money was handed out to individuals for free: "We'd rather suggest that instead of giving out N$ 100 to everyone every month, Government should be pushed to make it easier for equity participation by Namibians in local companies."

This sounds very much like business as usual, dating back to the anything but good old days. The representatives of the organised Namibian labour movement seemingly have come a long way from the time, when the slogan "an injury to one is an injury to all" had a different meaning. They seem to have forgotten that solidarity is a complementing notion if not prerequisite to social justice. Acts of solidarity are not confined to a particular era or stage of historical processes and struggles.

They are an ongoing commitment and engagement. "Solidarity, Freedom, Justice" has a continued meaning and relevance. In consequence, one can conclude that as long as "a luta continua" translates into "the looting continues", the struggle is indeed far from over but has to and will continue - not only, but also in Namibia.

Henning Melber is a member of SWAPO since 1974 and currently the Executive Director of The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala/Sweden.