By Staff Reporter. A DEAR friend of mine said to me that whenever he is holidaying outside the country, he has taken the deliberate decision of avoiding reading news from Namibia. My immediate question was why he avoided news from home. His reply was that news from Namibia tends to be very depressing and spoils his festive mood. From my perspective as a columnist, his view was not surprising for I am constantly on the hunt for good and bad news as fodder for my column space.
Certainly, there are moments when I feel that I want to avoid news from Namibia and focus on my other inconsequential matters. But, on the whole, I agreed with my friend. As a passionate spectator of the political scene, one could spectacularly look at how we do things with a sense of amusement. Alternatively, you weep. It is therapy and a survival strategy for dealing with the state-failure. However, Namibia is a young country and our stake, and that of future generations, lies on how we do things today.
In short, how the country is led. I raise this point in order to illustrate the past depressing few weeks and the kind of mind-boggling stuff one would not want to see in your country. From personal experience as someone who lived in four different countries on three continents, there are certain things that are as strange as they are, typically Namibian.
We do things that go against the common sense of governance. To illustrate this point, which does suggest willy-nilly improvisation, or to put it crudely a certain circus, a decision was taken to terminate the contract of the Director General of the NBC, Bob Kandetu. Second, it is in the normal order of things and how the country has been functioning for a while. It is one of those things that have become typically Namibian. Sadly, the DG had to account in a party-political manner to government and not to us citizens, irrespective of where we stand on the political map.
That is but one part of this sad, perhaps amusing story. In order to please and to ingratiate himself with his political audience, Theo Karipi allegedly took the courageous decision of banning NBC from reporting on the press conference of the dismissed DG. Alas, his fairytale ended two days later when he was told, just like the rest of us, that a certain Andrew Kanime with a human resources background from another parastatal would take over the affairs of NBC in an acting capacity. Many of us are in the dark as to why Kanime and as to what skills he would bring to the national broadcaster.
