Honourable Speaker!
Comrade, we’re suffering from an acute bout of buyer’s remorse. Your parliament is like those early amapiano songs that threaten to start for five minutes flat.
What are you waiting for?
Your sessions start late, you get bogged down in the rules and regulations and then you tjaila early.
You already only work half a day, three days a week. The only institution that enjoys a long weekend every weekend, and you only sit for a few months a year.
There’s no need to keep such a tight schedule if you achieve absolutely nothing daily.
The only thing doing any overtime in this parliament is your gavel.
Its thunderous constant drumming is as omnipresent as honourable Lukato Lukato.
It’s not a hammer, ma’am. And your problems aren’t nails.
This parliament might just walk away with the prize as the most unproductive if you do not change your tune.
I get it.
It’s a demotion and you don’t really want to be there, but as the head DJ, you need to take responsibility for the vibe and energy in the house.
Because your set so far has been an unlistenable staccato that stumbles from day to day as you seem to just hold the fort.
Barely.
Honourable Speaker, if you were a DJ, you’d be one of those Acer laptop varieties.
Pull up your socks.
People want to see the executive dance on poverty alleviation, yesterday!
Imagine seeing yourself as the country’s most toppest money person, its most successful finance minister, and long-serving Prime Minister, and you now have to spend your days admonishing prof Amupanda for not wearing the right school uniform.
It took almost an hour for the run-up to Amupanda asking his question in vernac in parliament on Tuesday.
In the end, Job’s big reveal fell on deaf ears as only the MPs could hear the English translation. AR should have fought for on-the-spot in parliament translation so the public could also hear the English version.
Kutya, was it a family dispute with the Kuugongelwa-Amadhilas that the good Dr brought to the house?
Even those of us who were taught Oshiwambo on the pillow were lost.
But the reaction by the Speaker said she was less than happy.
The now almost daily to-and-fro on applying the rules, interpreting the rules, and endlessly bickering about the rules until it’s time to zimbuka, is tiring.
The people sent you all to parliament to change things for them. If they were happy with business as usual, Swapo would still enjoy a two-thirds majority in parliament. When are you all starting with that work? There are laws to be made, repealed and amended, and a tax system to be reworked.
Top to bottom.
WRESTLING
The almost full-blown scuffle between the AR benches and security personnel in Namibia’s National Assembly last week triggered a series of public meltdowns, reactions and pontifications that left the simple blue jeans, the symbol of Western rebellion, entangled in an almighty grammatical and linguistic mis- and disinformation spree.
I guess it’s easy to get bamboozled by the word jeans because English and common sense were never bedfellows. Furthermore, Namibians do with English what we want.
We’ve seen anything from “jean pant” to “a jean” and many other varieties since Job Amupanda stood in parliament with his shirt torn, untucked, saying “you never let me finish”.
That wasn’t the only thing shouted in parliament recently that sounded more like it belonged in a bedroom, rather than in our very august lower house.
I’m not referring to that random “fuck you” that the honourable Speaker asked Sophia Shaningwa about the other day and then swept it under the rug.
This brings me to the seven-strong security personnel who struggled for what seems like hours to get two flyweight MPs out of the house. That’s a terrible use of a well-developed kapunda. These comrades need a crash course in riot policing if conditions for the majority of Namibians don’t change. Also, I prescribe a gut-busting boot camp for all active uniformed staff paid by the public. Those chaps are untrained, belligerent and out of shape.
Not to talk about being out of place inside parliament.
Honourable Speaker!
Worryingly, I thought the honourable Speaker would now wear the consequences of the AR scuffle on her face daily.
I was wrong.
But AR also.
Challenge the rules by convincing your colleagues of your conviction. You tried earlier this year to question Parliament’s obsession with praying to a Middle-Eastern absentee landlord who no one has ever seen. But even that attempt was half-hearted and low-energy.
No one cares if you’d rock up in parliament wearing only odelela onderbroeke and red star berets, just don’t look scruffy. You appear on behalf of people now and the place you operate from has rules.
Make your point by creatively using the rules or win enough seats to scrap them.
Amae!
Meanwhile, we are all waiting for the new laws that will improve our lives and for the repeal of the old laws that keep us under the jackboot of neoliberal hell.
But crickets from the ruling party. How are you screaming at the opposition to stop asking questions?
Etse, did you hear yourself?
The ruling party’s benches resemble those dance groups who came together for two practice sessions before the school’s talent competition. So far, Toby Aupindi is trying to appeal to fed-up educated urban young people with his cautious questioning of the status quo, Veikko Nekundi is trying to dance in the populists circle on the dance floor, while Paula Kooper attempts to play mischievous teacher’s pet.
Some dance gingerly, rhythmically independent of the prevailing beat, others are moving in dance-like movements while a few are frantically asking what move next as the majority stand at the back, arms folded. Unbothered.
This work-shy motley selection of Swapo cadres would be unable to organise a piss up in a brewery but remains dead set against every attempt to extend parliamentary working hours.
Let the music play, comrades.
Honourable Speaker, we need you to fix your sound and look up now and then.
There’s no one on the dance floor.
