Last Sunday night a tragedy of greater proportions than anything seen before in Namibia’s recent history happened in Walvis Bay, where a fire burned down “homes” of hundreds of people and a child died in the fire.
While this tragedy was taking place the country’s top leaders were wrapping up a gathering where they spent money and hours to “discuss” politics.
If this tragedy had happened before the year 1990 these same people who were gathered to discuss a political party’s problems would have strongly condemned it and blamed it on Apartheid.
But today, 30 years after 1990, the same people (so-called leaders of Namibia) quietly left the gathering and went to their houses and in the morning they woke up early to go to their offices to work doing things that only God knows what they are.
Sometimes I really wonder if we are people at all. Black people seem to be such that they don’t belong to the human race. Just how on earth can we be unable or unwilling to do better than this?
Our own brothers and sisters continue to live in poverty but we don’t care. How can a human being have such an attitude?
Twaloloka settlement was a collection of shacks. The people settled on the open space and made “homes” out of cardboards, plastic and planks taken from rubbish dumps because they were tired of paying rent to the landlords of Kuisebmund.
Most brick houses of Kuisebmund were built before Independence. And in the backyards of these houses the owners of the houses erected shacks which they rented out to other people. Initially these backyard shacks were meant for renting to fishermen.
But with the influx of people looking for jobs in the fishing factories more shacks were erected in backyards to accommodate the people.
Today more than half of the population of Walvis Bay lives in these backyard shacks.
Not only is it demonic to make people live in shacks, these shacks keep burning down now and then, making people lose their possessions.
And it is not only a situation unique to Walvis Bay but a national problem. These kinds of shacks are all over the country. In Windhoek, the capital city, more than half of the population lives in shacks.
But the country’s leadership, political leadership, business leadership, academic leadership and all kinds of leaderships seem not to care. They have no shame at all that this is the situation of the nation.
They continue acting as if they are not human beings.
Maybe they are not human beings at all. What is it that can justify that they are people? Are we people at all? Some people say that we black people should go back to the bush because we are not people.
Maybe the racists are right after all.
