The lack of sophistication in our politics has led to judgment based on what one sees. Eyes alone are not enough. In politics, eyes may only see what has been decided.
Stories on the eight o’clock news are a selection from the many collected. Someone decided which story is covered and which is ignored; what appears on the front page, and which picture accompanies it. Sophistication is needed, beyond descriptions of what is shown, especially when dealing with a nation’s politics.
Africa in general, and Black people in particular, have for centuries suffered from approaches elevating description over explanation. More than 1 800 years ago, ancient Greek physician Galen, in his ethnographic medical classifications, reduced the Black person to two characteristics: the “inordinate length of the penis” and “hilarity, a strong propensity for laughter.” This crude caricature spread uncritically, without explanation or interrogation of the sample size that informed Galen’s conclusions. When Sarah Baartman was abducted from South Africa in 1810 and paraded across exhibition halls in London and Paris because of what whites saw as “huge buttocks,” this descriptive, exploitative framework had been planted centuries earlier.
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This tyranny persisted after colonialism. In 2007, Sarkozy said at a Senegalese university, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has not entered into history enough.” Despite The Gambia being very beautiful, a 2024 World Bank study called it a sex tourism haven, without explaining how European women exploit poverty by buying younger local men.
After independence, African elites mimicked colonial behaviours, adopting the descriptive tools of their colonizers, as Frantz Fanon explained in The Wretched of the Earth. Achille Mbembe, in On the Postcolony, adds that when challenged, the African postcolonial state becomes a violent regime with theatrical power displays and institutional excess. These inheritances are evident in the 8th Parliament, where discourse is shallow, lacking reflection or depth. Society is told of “no law passed” and “walking out” without structural or contextual explanations for these events.
The current description of Parliament is vague and uninformative, likening it to an assembly line in a fish factory. It omits that from 1884 to 1990, the colonial state passed over 1,000 laws, with 36 years of the ‘free Parliament’ passing 15-30 laws annually. Three decades later, 100-200 colonial laws remain active. In 2021, when President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was MP, only three to four laws were enacted, with Swapo holding a large majority.
The descriptive discourse does not explain that when output was high, it was often because bills were rushed and bulldozed on account of numbers, not superior logic, thinking, and debate.
Passing laws is one thing; putting them into operation is another. The public is unaware that the government is sitting on more than 30 passed laws never brought into force. The Namibia Film Commission Act of 2000 has waited 26 years. The Accreditation Board of Namibia Act of 2005 remained in the dustbin for 21 years. The Lotteries Act of 2002 sat idle for 15 years. The Property Valuers Profession Act has gathered dust for 14 years. For 10 years, the Whistleblower Protection Act remains unimplemented. Only six bills lie before the National Assembly, yet the government sits on more than 30 passed laws. If the six are passed, they may join the dustbin–probably for another 10 years.
It is important to challenge descriptive narratives and understand space and time in politics. Geography and history shape political behaviour, power, and institutions. The current context limits the ruling party’s actions. Relying on past Swapo-dominated Parliaments to analyse the current, more progressive Parliament overlooks shifting dynamics.
Failing to adapt to a changing political epoch, the ruling party now expresses frustration through conjunctures when the reality is that MPs are rejecting old methods that reduced Parliament to an extension of its musical group. It has resorted to recruiting society to sympathise with its descriptive narratives. Inside Parliament, with few exceptions, it has not deployed its best brains to advance and win debates through superior logic. The only solution is bulldozing and voting. Relatedly, Swapo’s parliamentary leadership has responded to unfamiliar robust debate by using police and personal bodyguards to harass and intimidate MPs, turning up the heat and exposing their ineptitude. This is precisely the mutation Mbembe describes.
The party is unaware of the consequences of its tactics. Using bodyguards to suppress debates and harass MPs confirms the victims as fighters for the masses, while Swapo rightly emerges as a new oppressor. Relying on voting, bulldozing, and buying parties with positions shows they have lost the intellectual debate. This approach wins small battles but loses the war. Small injuries will eventually lead to the collapse of the giant. People will realise that these narratives, created by the ruling elite, are false and designed to manipulate.
Swapo has lost another battle at the sophisticated intellectual level. Its failing attempts to force MPs, who wear local clothes made by Namibian designers such as Ingo Shingenge, to wear European dress codes expose it as an agent of European modernity at the expense of local and African arts. Its obsession with colonial standards as “rules” and “decorum” is a complete surrender in the broader decolonisation debate. The failed attempt to prevent MPs from expressing themselves in local languages is another such exhibit.
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There should be no sympathy for Swapo’s crocodile tears, led by President Nandi- Ndaitwah, over laws not passed. The three laws passed in 2025 are the same as those in 2021 when Nandi-Ndaitwah was an MP. More laws remain unimplemented than the six in Parliament now. Swapo’s parliamentary leadership fails to understand the politics of time and space, causing fiascos. A tyrannic discourse ignoring Parliament’s current context shows a paternalistic mindset akin to Galen and Sarkozy.
There is an open window for Swapo, requiring understanding and acceptance of space and time–challenging for Swapo leadership. It offers clarity that strategic compromise and engagement may succeed and that the ‘enemy mindset’ should be set aside in Lubango. Swapo can ignore this advice, but defiant young MPs will continue their approach–either cooperating or antagonising, with no middle ground.
An intellectual gap must be filled. As such, this article will be followed by three others aimed at demystifying Parliamentary discourse and undermining the dominant descriptive narratives. The second instalment will examine Parliament’s institutional dynamics, highlighting fundamental weaknesses and how the legislature is incapable of carrying the political weight of the current space and time.
*Job Shipululo Amupanda is the Activist-in-Chief of the Affirmative Repositioning movement, Member of Parliament and an associate scholar at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany.
