WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2010-09-08 Time: 14:00:03 Posted By: News Poster
By Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari
LIKE many things in our country, the labour movement is chronically insecure. It is insecure because it does not have an independent identity. It is insecure because Union leadership became a class platform for material gain and not necessarily the interests of workers.
It is insecure because it has become sharp on political rhetoric and polemic, but short on the hard issues that define union militancy. It therefore must return to the drawing board in order to deal with its fault-lines. Such an opportunity exists this coming weekend when the National Union of Namibian Workers will hold a defining elective congress. Ordinarily, the discussions should be about the common goals of trade unions such as better working conditions, including a better way of life for Namibian workers. However, at the time of writing this piece, the agenda for the Congress has not yet been finalized. Differences over the agenda suggest long-standing divisions within the Union movement. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but these divisions about what workers ought to discuss at a Congress suggest at face value a class struggle within the labour movement.
While such differences are healthy and could perhaps be a temporary interregnum, serving as a defining moment for the long-term stability of the labour movement, the key issues affecting workers are in the short-term being left without stewardship. In the lead-up to the Congress, we haven’t seen a robust debate about the future of the Namibian worker. The fate of workers has never been as porous as it is at present, with a global economic recession that affected the well-being of the Namibian workers. In addition to a healthy contest about leadership, such a congress would also have been a fitting opportunity to issue a clarion call to government in order to enact policies that would protect workers in vulnerable sectors such as farming and importantly, a decent minimum wage for the ghastly and exploitative security industry.
Alas, much of the media analysis and reporting about this watershed congress is short on the structural reasons that have led to the current systemic paralysis within the workers movement. What we observe now in the National Union of Namibian Workers is not necessarily a sorry spectacle pitting the incumbent Secretary General, Evalistus Kaaronda, against a powerful labour aristocracy that has become too immersed in business. While such a view may hold traction, the ongoing dialectical class divisions have more to with the structural positioning and direction of the trade union movement since independence. In fact, Kaaronda’s leadership also perpetuated what has become a disenfranchising tradition of trade union militancy in Namibia after independence. Since independence, the NUNW has gone through and allowed two processes and forms that have been disenfranchising of worker’s interests.
The first form of disenfranchisement is the continued uncritical affiliation to the ruling party, Swapo. This has robbed the NUNW of an identity that would allow it to articulate laboru or pressing socio-economic and political issues without constantly looking behind its shoulders. Partisan affiliation has weakened and cowed the voice of the NUNW into a recipient of orders from several factions within the ruling party. NUNW is a laced with rent-seeking behaviour. Unlike Cosatu in South Africa that has been able to craft an independent and solid voice as an equal partner within an ANC-led alliance, NUNW is for its part politically spineless and carries no meaningful weight, but merely serve as fodder for worker’s loyalty toward Swapo. While Evalistus Kaaronda sought to intermittently engage government and business on various issues, his approach has been inconsistent and at times more politically cantankerous than one rooted in principle.
What we have been witnessing now is the second form of disenfranchisement – the explicit and unholy affiliation with business – trade union leaders as businessmen and board members. While we may live (uncomfortably that is) with the first form of disenfranchisement, the second is a worse and perverse form and amounts to a complete sell-out of the soul of the trade union movement. It would shame the intellectual legacy of Karl Marx. Admittedly, Kaaronda has acquainted himself fairly well as a trade union leader with this second form in which ‘trade unionists’ have now become full-blown businessmen and embedded in a perverse form of crony capitalism. In that instance, he deserves applause for trying to save what is left of a structurally flawed trade union movement.
It is not all gloomy, and congress provides a possible aggiornamento. What is essential for NUNW as an agent for social change is that it must become more assertive and more loyal to the ideology of the trade union movement. For this to happen, NUNW does not only need union leaders with deep convictions, but there is also a need to deepen the intellectual capital of NUNW. In short, for the NUNW to change its tone and body language, it must be convinced about its place and raison d’être as a trade union in the socio-economic and political life of the country. The forthcoming congress ought to be a platform to think the future of workers and not serve as a platform to consolidate a self-serving full-blown business aristocracy that has penetrated the trade union movement.
Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari is a PhD fellow in political science at the University of Paris-Panthéon Sorbonne, France. He currently teaches political science (international politics) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Original Source: 
Original date published: 3 September 2010
Source: http://allafrica.com/stories/201009080056.html?viewall=1