Welcome


Want some insight in Namibian politics? I am no expert but have 16 years (1995-2011) of writing on Namibian politics in The Namibian newspaper and can probably offer you a bit more than you know about the who's who in the Namibian political zoo. You will also find a few articles commenting on other issues of concern in the country. Hope you find it interesting. - Christof

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Dealing With The Symptoms Rather Than The Causes

ON February 9 1990 an open-air ceremony was held on the steps of the then colonial Tintenpalast administration building where all 72 members of the Constituent Assembly, led by its chairman, Hage Geingob, agreed on a new Constitution for Africa’s last colony.

“Now, therefore, we the people of Namibia accept and adopt this Constitution as the fundamental law of our sovereign and independent Republic,” Geingob said during that ceremony.

The next month, on March 21, the country’s first President, Sam Nujoma, said in his inaugural speech that Namibians will be “the masters of this vast land of our ancestors. The destiny of this country is now fully in our own hands”.

For the past 20 years we were, thus, supposed to be masters of our own destiny.

The “sick society” that some have referred to over the past two weeks following the barbaric killing of schoolgirl Magdalena Stoffels thus made me wonder where things have gone wrong and why we seem to have lost the moral fibre to the extent that we are constantly faced images of almost unsurpassed gore.

Is it a case of violence being used by men to achieve a certain purpose? And how effectively can we respond to such violence?

I am not qualified enough to come up with solutions to the questions I have just posed.

However, I am ‘dead’ certain that calls for the death penalty are misdirected, even though we are hurt by the atrocities committed against our daughters, mothers and sisters.

We need something more radical than the death penalty, life imprisonment or an effective justice system. Somehow we must recover the values of life as a nation.

There is an age-old African proverb that says “it takes a village to raise a child”. That is, among others, what I am alluding to. It strikes at the heart of what we are experiencing today.

My issue today, however, is about the calls for the return of the death penalty and the cries by some of the angry mob who pleaded with the Police to hand over the suspect in the Stoffels case so that they could avenge her death by killing him in return.

Similar calls were made in February 2005 when two girls, Rachel Hamatundu (6) and Manuela Sofia Hoesemas (4) were raped and brutally murdered in Swakopmund and Windhoek within a space of a week.

The reaction included calls for the death penalty; cries that we have lost morals; are a hypocritical society which accommodates and protects criminals; and calls for a commission of inquiry into rape, murder and domestic violence.

Looking back on those two cases now, it appears that our response towards violence remains more muscle than power. Our blood reaches boiling point for a couple of days but then we revert to the same devil-may-care attitude with which we had tackled many other crucially important issues.

The only time we hear such concerns is when those who make careers and money out of citizens’ problems, air them once again! And I found it sickening to notice this week how some supposedly ‘concerned’ people tried to cash in through publicity stunts with the death of late Magdalena.

Some people wearing political parties’ colours at a clean-up operation, others distributing company T-shirts to promote themselves while some organised/attended a clean-up in a riverbed which had already been cleaned simply to get publicity.

One news report even said the young girl would be buried in a T-shirt of a certain entertainment group!

But back to the death penalty, which is a big ‘no’ for Namibia because for it to happen we must completely throw away the Constitution – our fundamental law as Geingob referred to it 20 years ago.

Chapter three of Namibia’s Constitution explicitly outlaws capital punishment as it states that that part of the fundamental human rights and freedoms cannot be amended.

Article 6 in that chapter states that the right to life shall be respected and protected – that is irrespective of whether we are dealing with a rapist or a murderer.

“No law may prescribe death as a competent sentence. No court or tribunal shall have the power to impose a sentence of death upon any person. No executions shall take place in Namibia,” the article states.

Thus for the death penalty to return, we must first completely get rid of our Constitution – something which is certainly not desirable or advisable right now.

Also, Namibia has signed several international treaties which enshrine the right to life and thus we are obligated to honour them.

Studies elsewhere have not been able to show that the death penalty can deter or reduce crime rates.

What it has shown is that the death penalty can lead to state-sponsored killing of innocent people. In countries like the United States, individuals who were on death row were released following an appeal which showed their innocence.

All I am saying is that (a) individuals are innocent until proven guilty and thus cannot be handed over for mob justice and (b) the death penalty is basically a cop-out from dealing with the root problems facing our society.

In fact, Members of Parliament in the National Council should be among those on the forefront, not only to protect the Namibian Constitution, but also help tackle the social decay which contributes to the senseless violence and the horrific killings.

I am as horrified by Magdalena’s untimely death as I was by the deaths of Rachel and Manuela, but killing the perpetrators, who by the way are our own sons and come from our midst, instead of dealing with the underlying social causes which result in these atrocities, is not the solution.

No comments:

Post a Comment