Dusting ourselves …
By The Author [When My Mind is Liberated]
We are half-way into our graves but every year we dust ourselves and hope for the best.
Our shortcomings we hide under our new year’s resolutions and adopt other people’s dreams and pray on them.
Every year, we are becoming our worst enemies and walk into the new year like cattle pushed ready for the slaughter house.
In 2021, we are again going to promise ourselves to do better, even our enemies we forgive and courtesy to the New Year our enemies allow us to indulge in the ceasefire; for a little while.
For many Artists, we hope for the COVID-19 to be declared over so that we can openly be abused and denied by the public and private sector. We are tired of being overtaken by COVID-19.
I mean we cannot make money with COVID-19 still in the [Namibian] house.
With the previous diseases one could create social programmes and become an agent against the further spread of these ailments. HIV was the biggest money maker, and many people turned it into a lucrative industry and milked it to the extent of bleeding it.
Even then, HIV and Aids could sustain social empires as well as providing consistent income for creative artists.
These days, the exploits of COVID-19 is enjoyed only by the administrators.
For some of you who don’t quite get it. Being an Artist is the same as being a member of one of the most marginalised people in Namibia.
Yet, the people managing the programmes of the most marginalised are the very people who are thriving on the demise of the marginalised. It’s like asking a bully to initiative an anti-bully programme and then implement it: to monitor and evaluate the success of such a programme.
Wait, it is too early for lamenting… Or timely?
So in the fifth month of last year, the government initiated the COVID-19 Relief programme and excited some citizens with a once off 750 NAD.
In the mean time they continued paying themselves full salaries with all the benefits, assuming that the rest of the Namibians are street magicians that could re-use the 750 NAD for the rest of the year.
Then so many fashionable programmes and relief packages to stimulate the economy were initiated in the government offices; some were just borrowed from “Uncle Google” and implemented on “voetstoots”.
COVID-19 became the password to get funding from government agencies and since Artists live in a very unique dimension alien to the resources, they care less about the protocols that became the new “requirement” and continued “Arting” and Creating out of sheer habit and boredom.
Some lucky Artists received grants on grounds only known to the “cultural experts” and their agents. The unfortunate Artists received “massive grants” to the tune of 2000 NAD to “add value” to their art works.
Oops! I am complaining again… But am I?
At times complaining is but a full time hobby for many Namibians; it’s therapeutic, given the socio-economic decay in Namibia. For the ones who use microscopes to measure the pain and suffering of the majority of the citizens, our lamenting sounds like complaints, but for us it’s the dusting off of our pain, frustration and humiliation in a country of great riches yet great suffering.
After all, there is nothing artistic of a starving citizen, their cries and moaning are but expressions of death.
