Africa and other states to follow the Namibian "model for
Were Namibian workers protesting against model democracy? Quite the contrary. They were protesting because their industrial union organisers had not been properly consulted in the May Day organising committee about proposals from SWAPO officials that this year the march be held through 'white" Windhoek, that employers help pay for the celebrations and display their products, and that, after the main rally, a separate state banquet be held for overseas guests and VIPs.
Even before the event, union
VOTE SWAPO 389 InEPENDANCE Namibia: a 'model'
by Leslie Gould leaders had insisted that employers and the state keep their hands off May Day. They wanted workers to organise their own day as had become the practice under the last years of colonial occupation. So, despite over 15,000 SWAPO-affiliated unionised workers in the capital's Katutura township, only 600 went on the march, and only 2,000 went to the stadium to hear SWAPO President, Sam Nujoma, and Labour Minister, Chief Witbooi.
Stalinist theory
One of the great dogmas of the twentieth century, derived from Joseph Stalin and the Russian Mensheviks, is that colonial countries like Namibia must go through a 'national democratic revolution divorced from socialism, and that socialist tasks should not be on the agenda until "democracy' is fully established. This rigid mechanical formula has been rammed down the throats of every young activist in the southem African liberation movements, including SWAPO, for the past thirty years.
Stalinist political culture was most severe amongst SWAPO's exiled leadership in Angola and Zambia, a
section of which, throughout the 1980s in the remote war zones of southern Angola used a tribal 'securitate' to purge young militants and dissenters who questioned their decisions. At least 1,500 SWAPO members were detained in Angola, held in makeshift dungeons without adequate food and water, and tortured to confess that they and others were "spies for Pretoria'.
Since the UN-supervised return of exiles last year, it has been confirmed that at least 120 detainees were killed by the SWAPO security branch, and 263 are officially still missing. but these UN figures are believed to be gross underestimates.
Younger SWAPO activists and union militants inside Namibia were less tightly controlled and more influenced by the politics of COSATU in South Africa. At the May Day rally, the pro-SWAPO President of the National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW), John Shaetonhodi, said that "The workers of Namibia would like their future to be free of exploitation, free of exploitative capitalism'. He said 'We don't want our economy to be under the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 25, June 1990
control of market forces*. He urged workers in Namibia to 'pool their efforts with other working people in the world, particularly in Africa', and increase their union strength and activities as well as in effective management of our industries*.
These perspectives have emerged from two decades of militant worker struggle, and from building a democratic union movement along COSATU lines. Although, the small working class in Namibia is less than 200,000 permanently employed out of a population of 1.6 million, and is scattered over a vast arid territory the size of Britain and France put together, NUNW membership is today approaching 50% of the Paid workforce. The newest NUNW union, the Domestic and Allied Workers Union, has an all-woman executive.
Power of
workers South African troops in Northern Namibia
From virtual slavery under a triballysegregated contract labour system, and suffering a 90% white monopoly of recognised skills, workers in Namibia have asserted considerable power during the 1970s and 1980s through mass stayaways, strikes, consumer boycotts and other means.
Their persistent support of SWAPO was the main Pretoria could not impose its 'internal settlement client regime on the colony. Part of their success rests on a vibrant working class youth movement, especially the Namibia National Students Organisation (NANSO) which has 105 branches and covers virtually every secondary school in the country. Now the retumed SWAPO leaders are demanding simply 'patience" and 'discipline".
As part of the Gorbachev 'new realism', the US and Soviet Union brokered a deal signed in December 1988 for South Africa to end its 75year occupation of Namibia, in exchange for a phased pull-out of 50,000 Cuban troops from Angola. After allowing the premeditated massacre of over 300 SWAPO combatants by South African counter-insurgency forces in April last year, the SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 25, June 1990
SUPPLEMENT UN stage free and fair elections to a marxists believe. Namibian constituent assembly in November.
SWAPO won a majority, but because of South African slush money, voter registration distortions and the impact of the SWAPO detainee issue, the nationalist movement ended 7 seats short of the two-thirds required under the Western power independence plan to approve the constitution.
No right to strike
The Assembly is said to have drawn up the most democratic constitution in Africa. A multi party system and separation of executive, legislature and judiciary are guaranteed, as is a long list of fundamental rights. But the NUNW's attempts to get the right to strike and other union and social rights guaranteed in the constitution were thwarted by the SWAPO leadership. Some such rights are listed, but they are *derogable' or subject to qualification. The whole constitution was drawn up and debated in a secret committee, and the technical drafting done by three South African lawyers.
Aware of the weakness of SWAPO's own military forces regrouping from Angola. and the armed presence of South Africansponsored Namibian soldiers angry about being demobilised, the SWAPO leadership has done everything possible to placate Pretoria and the Western powers. This might change gradually, but the economy too is one of the easiest in the world to destabilise and, despite its militancy, the working class is relatively isolated in the region and internationally. Developing a strategy for socialism in Namibia is a much more
monitoring force managed to complex task than sloganeering euro-
The crippling legacy of colonialism has left over 30% unemployed, high rates of malnutrition, over 60% absolute illiteracy, a heavy reliance on imported foodstuffs, a grossly unequal distribution of income, enormous land hunger and a vast drain abroad of Namibia's locally produced wealth. 150,000 Namibians are in drought affected areas and dependent on food aid. How can the colonial economy. which has been highly integrated into the South African economy, be
& restructured to meet popular needs and still attract foreign capital? Namibia's roads, railways, telecommunications and electricity lines are linked to South Africa, and the country's only trading port, Walvis Bay, remains OCcupied by the John Liebenberg/NCCT colonial power.
90% of imports are derived from or routed via South Africa. Pretoria has also left the Windhock administration with a $200m budget deficit and a $300 million debt. Sensitive talks are now underway to decide who will finance these. Namibia has international law on its side, but will probably decide that alienating the bankers and Pretoria's hawks is not worth it.
Whites stay on
The 78,000 white Namibians -mostly Afrikaans and German speaking settlers - have monopolised skills, local business and 80% of the cultivatable land. Worried by the rapidly changing events in South Africa, and buoyed by the overtures of the new Namibian government's guarantee of existing private property, whites have not fled in the same numbers as they did from Zimbabwe in 1980, so few skilled jobs are available. So far, very few farms have been put up for sale since November's SWAPO election viclory.
With the war still raging in neighbouring Angola, and the working class in Namibia left in relative isolation, there is little room for manoeuvre. The new government
"The whole constitution was drawn up and debated in a secret committee, and the technical drafting done by three South African lawyers" "whites have not fled in the same numbers as they did from Zimbabwe in 1980, so few skilled jobs are available" Page 19
"there is no hope of genuinely democratic structures emerging unless based upon the strength of the international working class. The question is, will socialists in the imperialist countries respond to the challenge?" Page 20
WALVIS BAY Despite Namibian Independence - still held by South Africa hopes to both redress injustices against the black majority, and to ensure economic growth in a continent starved of capital inflows, by promoting a mixed economy, rather than
nationalization which SWAPO had threatened in the 1970s. While this has boosted business confidence -during 1989, a total of 584 new companies were registered in Namibia, compared to 276 in the previous year - little has been offered to workers.
Many South African firms are reregistering under Namibian names and there are few overseas multinaeconomic slowdown experienced by Namibia during the 1980s, during which the real level of GDP dropped, might be reversed temporarily, but at the expense of the working class.
The whole economy is dominated by three foreign mining companies. Contributing 72% of all Namibia's foreign exchange earnings, mining accounts for 28% of GDP. Other major components are fishing and capitalist agriculture racially dominated by 5,000 white ranchers. Already, a goverment minister has said that farmworkers don't need a statutory minimum wage and many firms have continued victimising union members without official redress.
Absentee landlords
Under this economic system, hope for Namibia's wage-dependent peasantry is also bleak. It is estimated that 40% of white ranches are owned by absentee landlords and these are the target of the new government's Zimbabwe-style land reform plans. But such land is arid and will not sup port tens of thousands of peasant arable farmers resettled from the overcrowded north in addition to the
SUPPLEMENT
landless Welcome
peasants alto South Africa me ranches ready near
workers GOOD NEIGHBOURS employed on them. The government also wants to develop commerical peasant agriculture to transfom subsistence the north, on which over a third of Namibia's adult population depends. schemes require massive foreign aid and, unless carried out on the basis of social ownership, will merely produce a rich Kulak layer and more landlessness.
There is no doubt that, in the absence of a working class alternative, the small black Namibian petty bourgeois, as well as middle class layers, will try to begin a major process of capitalist accumulation - as has oc curred in Zimbabwe and other former white settler colonies. Current indications are that Namibia might receive about $300 million in foreign aid when the international donors' conference for Namibia is held in New York during the last week of June. The World Bank is helping draw up over 300 new projects. The new government intends introducing a new liberal investment code.
Export of capital
This strategy entails grave dangers for workers in Namibia. To reverse the 50% drop in real gross domestic fixed investment experienced between 1979 and 1987, the export of capital to South Africa must be stopped. But, to attract any foreign investment, the new government must retain, for the time being, Namibia's membership of the Rand Monetary Area and the Southem Africa Customs Union.
Dr Otto Herrigel, the Swiss trained Finance Minister, has already invited the International Monetary Fund to help create Namibia's own central bank. Even then, Namibia has insufficient foreign exchange reserves and fiscal stability, and financial power will remain with the South African government and its Reserve Bank. Herein lies the heart of "model"
democracy.
The only way out for workers in Namibia is to link their struggle with socialist forces in South Africa and through the region. But, even then. the workers' movement desperately needs support in the US and Britain in particular. British companies are the most numerous in Namibia after those registered in South Africa and the British army has been called in to "integrate' SWAPO's army with the
forces as in Some links have been established be tween British and Namibian trade unions, but these are mostly at the broadened. And the Namibian youth and student movement must be aided as well, especially with socialist
Bush's Angolan contras
The role of the US in the region is extremely dangerous. On May 15, the Angolan contra leader, Jonas Savimbi of Unita, thanked the US government for a secret emergency airlift of weapons, which by mid-May ap peared to have enabled his forces to repulse a four-month Angolan government offensive in the south east of Angola. In April, US aid to Namibia was made conditional on Namibia's army not being deployed northwards against Unita.
With over 30,000 Cuban troops now withdrawn from Angola, the bureaucratised forces of the MPLA government can only control urban areas in much of the country. 800,000 Angolans are affected by drought as food production has fallen in war zones. Facing a sharp reduction of its once massive Soviet aid, the MPLA has also tumed to the IMF and World Bank in a desperate attempt to ap pease US capital. Even de Beers has been allowed back in to the diamond fields. The MPLA has had to open talks with the Unita bandits, spon sored by Zaire and Portugal (under US supervision), with a Zimbabwe/Namibia-style solution as the aim.
Imperialism's preferred future of the