Tough Union Choices Still To Be Made

Tough Union Choices Still To Be Made


LABOUR analyst Herbert Jauch, pondering the destiny of the National Union of Namibian Workers (NUNW) 10 years ago, wrote that there were “some tough choices to be made by Namibia’s trade unions”.

Indeed true and very urgent, I thought at the time. But how wrong I was.
The umbrella federation has cruised through the last century at the expense of the workers.
The ‘best’ the unions have done is to expose hibernators, fight over leadership and churn out candidates for the Swapo Party parliamentary list.
They continue to lose more and more of their cadres to influential Government positions but they stick to the whims of the ruling party instead of using their positions to the workers’ advantage.
The majority of those leaders have so far been guilty of conflation of political and worker interests.
Each year they contribute to the ‘zombification’ of the working class as they have lost many of their rights through compromises by their leaders.
Last week the new National Assembly has, once again, seen two union stalwarts, NUNW president Alpheus Muheua and Namibia Public Workers Union’s Eliphas Dingara, in the quicksand of Swapo politics.
They are lost to union politics.
In the case of Muheua anyone but a blind man could have seen the writing on the wall.
Like many others before him he has sacrificed his position as a union leader in the party over the past couple of years.
The most significant of his roles was when he sat on the Government negotiating team while he was president of NUNW, and told workers that they were not entitled to their demands.
Muheua was also among the first people who badmouthed the new Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) in 2007 when he addressed a workers’ leadership retreat.
At that meeting he also reminded all and sundry that NUNW would remain in Swapo.
He had adopted the same tactic used by others before him who gunned for the opposition and at the speed of light ended up in Parliament.
Unions have thus lost many a firebrand leader who have become spokespersons of the ruling party and Government.
The recipe is the same for every union leader. Make the loudest noise against the ‘enemies’ of the State like ‘Boers’, imperialists, confused opposition; chant for land grabs and foreign-owned media and you get the ticket to the ruling party’s parliamentary list. This constitutes very cheap politicking at the expense of union business.
One of the first signs of the unions’ precipitous descent into the world of Swapo was in 1994 when Bernhardt Esau was the General Secretary and announced that the NUNW was considering forming its own political party. This caused consternation in the unions as well as among Swapo and state security circles.
Soon Esau was summoned to Swapo headquarters and quickly retracted his statement.
By late the same year he, John Shaetonhodi and late Walter Kemba, were on former President Sam Nujoma’s choice of 32 of Swapo candidates for the 1994 parliamentary elections. Today he is the Minister of Fisheries.
The new Deputy Minister of Agriculture Petrus Iilonga controversially remained Secretary General of Napwu while he was in Parliament.
In October 1999 former President Sam Nujoma appointed the late Gabes Shihepo as Deputy Minister of Information. A month before that he was the president of the Namibia National Farmers’ Union (NNFU) and organised the biggest demonstration of communal farmers calling for land reform to be speeded up.
A year later we saw NUNW president late Ponhele ya France threatening with a Zimbabwe-style land grab during a May Day rally and rapping “Namibians of European origin” for being unwilling to co-operate to redress the discrepancies brought about by colonialism.
He was subsequently rewarded with a seat in Parliament.
The million-dollar question is whether the workers actually benefit from the elevation of their leaders.
Unions have become powerless in their negotiations with, for example, the Government.
Workers continue to suffer with low wages, unreasonable dismissals, unabated retrenchments and general disregard of basic human rights as the unions affiliated to Swapo continuously fail to influence policies.
As they are on a Swapo ticket, the union leaders seem more accountable to the party than the working masses and cannot even be recalled by members.
In short, they are Swapo MPs and not unionists.
It is time for the workers to reassert the benefits, if at all, that they get from representation in Parliament. The tough choices Jauch referred to 10 years ago are now more urgent than before.
As it is now, change is a distant reality as long as union leaders are unable to extricate themselves from the quagmire called Swapo.

* This article first appeared in The Namibian