Thinking Geingob’s Legacy: Critical Questions – News

The above quotation by one of Britain’s eminent public philosophers is a timely and compelling reminder that one should think before one speaks and writes on a matter as contested as the legacy of a person.

Like that of surgery, the art of philosophy requires mastering a sizeable body of knowledge. Unlike those of a surgeon, however, the instruments are conceptual – instruments that can be used to enter, analyse, criticise, and evaluate ideas, concepts, arguments, visions and theories.

LEGACY

When our country’s third president Hage Geingob, recently went down time’s last lane, an unprecedented number of memorial services and candlelight vigils in his honour took place. Numerous speakers reminisced about his insights, advice, love, ideas, achievements, kindness, wit and legacy. All of that is perfectly understandable given his imprint and rewarding work in this country and beyond. For him, action was the proper fruit of knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, his core mantra featured powerfully: As a ‘freedom fighter’, the primary architect of the Constitution, as a consensual unifier, as the motor behind the politics of national reconciliation, as a believer in institutions, systems and processes, as the one who identified and groomed young talent, as a skillful mediator, as a thinker, as a family man, as a person with a sense of justice, as a pan-Africanist and as a global statesman.

Most of the above rings true and may indeed be worthy of emulation, but: Is it wise to distil a legacy of someone who most recently joined the dominion of the dead?  Is it not possible, perhaps advisable, to attempt thinking differently about the legacy of a person? 

I believe, there are indeed different ways of thinking about the legacy of our late third president. For in philosophy, an argument is the most basic unit of reasoning. Philosophers make inferences from one or more starting points (truth claims called a ‘premise’ or ‘premises’) to an end point (a ‘conclusion’).

Such arguments have to meet certain criteria such as: Simplicity (go with the least complicated explanation). Coherence (go with an explanation that other experts already believe to be true) and testability (go with the theory that yields the best predictive power).

While arguments and explanations are related, they are not the same. A general rule is that arguments attempt to explain that something is true, while explanations attempt to show how something is true. For example, if we say that the former president was a unifier, a nation-builder, or tribal neutral, we need to show valid and reliable evidence that it is true and offer explanations why and how it is true.

ETHICS

In a moral sense, is/was the construct of the ‘Namibian House’ a ‘thin’ or a ‘thick’ ethical concept? What was the true nature of the analogy between the metaphor of the ‘Namibian House’ and actual socio-politics? Analogies, of course, have many different uses in our lives. They advance ideas in politics, governance, morals, poetry, art, legal reasoning, and so forth. But was the analogy of the ‘Namibian House’ useful in making possible the representation of necessary connections among citizens when the country faces a housing backlog of some 300 000 units and is manifestly socially and spatially divided and skewed along class and racial lines?

If we argue that a person was and acted ethically – as was widely asserted in relation to the late president – then one needs to show how such thinking and actions contributed towards the restoration of the moral integrity of society and the state. How ethical considerations impacted upon the allocation of public resources? On the politics of ‘who gets what, when and how’?

Moreover, where do we locate the ‘Fishrot’ scandal – the biggest in the country’s recent past – in the overall scheme to build a national integrity system? How do we account for the fact that Namibia, measured against international criteria, has not made progress in terms of its integrity rating?

SHARED PROSPERITY

What explains why the notions of ‘inclusive growth’ based on ‘shared prosperity’ and ‘poverty eradication’ two of the preferred language constructs in the political grammar of the late president, remain rather elusive to actualise? 

Is it because of flawed policy logic? External constraints beyond the capacity of decision-makers to transcend? The microphysics of biopower – of which the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84) – wrote with commendable insight? It is as Foucault argued, our admired concepts, institutions, practices and systems, have devised devices for control, manipulation and oppression?  Significantly, in the Namibian case, as shown by various Afrobarometer surveys, trust in public institutions declined, particularly over the past few years.

Or is the worm in the apple, neo-liberal economics with its canonical belief in the market and trickle-down growth? Or is it perhaps due to the nature of the comprador state that sustains class relations, feeds corruption, and works in the interest of local and transnational capital?  Is it on account of our specific form of corporatised liberation with its dark networked state features?       

POSSIBILITY AND IMPOSSIBILITY

Possibility and impossibility are important in philosophy. Which aspects of the late president’s legacy are likely to become possible? Which impossible, and for what reasons? Something is logically possible as long as it does not contain any contradictions or, more broadly, as long as it does not break the laws of logic.

Which parts of the late president’s legacy were logically impossible? Which parts of his legacy were a physical impossibility, meaning breaking the laws of nature, such as development that is not environmentally and socially sustainable? Which other kinds of possibility and impossibility, beyond the means now and in the future may arise? We might include here notions of technologically, politically, legally or financially possible and impossible outcomes.

What did the former president mean when he proclaimed in this ‘Year of expectation’ he would leave the country in a better shape upon his retirement from the highest office in the land? Was he thinking about the untold riches that may accrue from the recent oil and gas discoveries and the potential of green hydrogen? How does one square this with unemployment that hovers around 40%? Some 400 000 Namibians that are food insecure? The exponential rise in public debt? Who will become more prosperous? The citizens or the elite cartel, both local and global, that stands to benefit most from such fossil fuel discoveries and from green hydrogen?    

CONCLUSION

Philosophical reasoning is not general. We need to know where we stand in ethics and politics, for there has to be a way in which our beliefs and arguments can be true.

In practical life, the equivalent virtue is that there has to be a way in which our core values can be practised through individual and collective agency. There has to be a shared minimal consensus of what constitutes the common good. Does such a consensus reside in the ‘Namibian House’? In our national development framings?

In the fullness of time, we might find the answers to these and other questions on the legacy of our late president.

• André du Pisani is emeritus professor of politics at the University of Namibia (Unam). He writes in his private capacity.