People with no vision perish like fools

By Victor Angula |

Within the next eight (8) years we will reach the year 2030.

The year 2030 will be the moment when we will sit at the crossroads of humanity and weep over the journey we have travelled as a modern nation – at 40 years of Independence.

While in the early 2000’s Namibia’s Founding President Dr. Sam Nujoma envisioned a future of shared prosperity by the year 2030, his vision was a mirage. It was a fantasy, an illusion. Just the hallucinations of our first president.

Dr. Nujoma’s Vision 2030 has turned out to be not a vision or even a dream but just a nightmare he had at State House. Hopefully he will be alive by the year 2030, so that we will sit with him at the crossroads and cry together.

And while we cry, other people like the Chinese will be at the top of the pyramid socially and economically, maybe politically too, all because they had a vision.

The problem and mistake done by Dr. Nujoma is that he came up with a vision, and then he got experts to draft a thick document called: “Vision 2030: Prosperity, Harmony, Peace and Political Stability”, then the final thing he did is that he gave the document over to government departments for them to implement the vision.

And then he retired.

Nothing was done to transfer the vision to the people. As soon as Nujoma retired all the people close to him started focusing on self-enrichment. The vision was forgotten. Politics of the belly, economics of the pot, became the norm.

The vision of the nation was about consistent national enrichment and sustainable prosperity for all. And that could be done only if all the people pull together and collectively implement programmes and projects of industrialisation, commercialisation and digitalisation.

But over the last 22 years of Vision 2030 nothing has taken place. No industrialisation took place, no commercialisation occurred, and no digitalisation happened.

Nothing happened because the people in public offices and in private offices, the people who received the Vision 2030 document, were busy making themselves millionaires at the expense of the rest of the nation – at the expense of the vision.

So today we even have such kind of problems as the fact that Namibian football has for ever been in a mess. Our stadiums have collapsed to such an extent that we have to go to South Africa to play our home games.

Leadership squabbles at the NFA continue, to such an extent that domestic football has died many years ago; it is as a result of the culture of eating which has been institutionalised.

Even the judiciary is not spared by the culture of eating; this is why the justice system is in a mess.

Politics is in a mess. The economy is in a mess.

All this is because Namibia is a collective group of people who have no vision, and, no doubt, people without a vision will perish like fools.