PAUL T. SHIPALE (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar)
When writing refuses to be silent
Amílcar Cabral warned that the hardest battle is against our own weaknesses. We heard him. And we wrote.
This year, our writing did not seek approval. It demanded accountability. Political liberation is not automatic emancipation. It is not an excuse for mediocrity.
The greatest danger in liberation struggles is not only external it is within us. In the weakness that trades principles for power. In memory weaponized as a political shield. In comfort chosen over the discipline required.
Here, memory is not shelter. It is demand. Liberation is not accumulated capital. It is continuous discipline. It is political courage. It is unyielding vigilance.
Those unwilling to face this can look away. We will not. Because our fingers did not merely chronicle events; they cross-examined power. They rejected the etiquette of silence, distrusted the comfort of official narratives, and refused the soft, administrative violence of forgetting. What emerged was not commentary for polite circulation but a sustained act of civic duty and defiance, an insistence that Namibia, and Africa, confront themselves without filters, without slogans, and without the nostalgia of liberation but be its guardians.
These texts were not written to accompany history. They were written to interrupt it.
Read together, they do not form an archive of opinion. They constitute a political self-portrait of a nation pausing at the edge of its own future, uncertain whether to step forward or retreat into myth.
This was not a literary exercise. It was a moral compass.
Undertaken with full awareness that discomfort is the price of truth.
On this long march, we return to revolutionary teachings and lessons that arm us not only against external domination but also against the subtle, internal decay born out of trading principle for comfort, access, or trivial reward. The views expressed here are ours alone, advanced in our personal capacity as citizens and committed Pan-Africanists.
The weight of giants and the burden of inheritance
We began where power prefers reverence to inquiry: with memory.
Not memory as ritual. Memory as responsibility.
Our reflections on figures like Dr Theo-Ben Gurirab and Founding President Sam Nujoma were not acts of sanctification and deification. They were acts of measurement. We asked what moral weight leadership carries when authority speaks loudly but means very little.
By interrogating the substance of the “Founding Father” designation, we forced an uncomfortable question into the open:
What happens when liberation memory mutates is shelved barely a year after his passing?
From Heroes Day to Cuito Cuanavale, we rejected history as a mausoleum – quiet, sacred, and politically inert.
Memory, if it is to mean anything, must issue demands.
Memory must become a mandate and must be protected and not paralysed.
From liberation to lethargy
Running through this year was a diagnosis whispered but rarely dared: liberation movements, once engines of emancipation, risk degenerating into custodians of stagnation.
We confronted the taboo: historical legitimacy is not synonymous with present moral authority.
Cabral’s warning about “the battle against our own weaknesses” was not an ornament. It was a verdict.
Colonialism did not doom us to dysfunction. What threatens us now is the decision to govern as if liberation were a lifetime exemption from renewal.
Liberation is not a pension. It is a discipline; otherwise, it decays.
Leadership under the microscope: beyond symbolism
With the emergence of a New Dawn, our scrutiny intensified not from hostility, but from obligation.
We placed in deliberate tension:
• “Business Unusual” and the Developmental State
• Symbolic rupture and structural reform
• Visionary language and fiscal gravity
Through critique and analysis, we asked what power almost never asks itself:
Can ambition survive without institutional reinvention, or does it fossilise into another archive of broken promises?
Our skepticism was not sabotage. It was patriotism without anesthesia.
Governance, opposition and the slow erosion of accountability
By interrogating the official opposition, selective accountability, and the bureaucratic neutralisation of dissent, we traced the anatomy of democratic fatigue.
Democracy rarely collapses dramatically. It is eroded administratively through delays, omissions, and the quiet conversion of rules into weapons.
When unity becomes performance, when consensus replaces contestation, and when procedure suffocates principle, the centre does not hold. It hollows out.
In such moments, silence is not neutrality. It is collusion.
Diplomacy, Sovereignty, and Africa in a World of Giants
From economic diplomacy to global summits, we returned relentlessly to one unresolved question:
Is Africa exercising sovereignty or merely rehearsing it for external audiences?
We argued for people-centred diplomacy, transformative regionalism, and the courage to reject proxy politics disguised as pragmatism.
In a world structured by asymmetry, Africa cannot afford decorative sovereignty.
Symbolic presence without strategic agency is not dignity. It is managed irrelevance.
Resources, land, and the political economy of exclusion
Whether addressing uranium, mining, or resettlement collapse, the pattern was unmistakable: extraction without dignity, growth without justice, sovereignty without inclusion.
Economic decline is rarely accidental. It is usually the cumulative outcome of policy inertia, elite insulation, and institutional stagnation.
A state that cannot translate resources into shared dignity is not unlucky. It is failing by design or by refusal.
Culture, language, and the long memory of civilization
Even our engagement with language and memory pointed to a deeper unease: Africa is increasingly taught to remember itself only through trauma, never through continuity, creativity, or civilisational confidence.
To decentre singular suffering was not erasure. It was a demand for wholeness.
A people reduced only to pain are easier to administer, pacify, and rule without consent.
A Year of Writing as Resistance
Taken individually, these texts may appear diverse. Taken together, they form a single, sustained thesis:
• Against historical laziness
• Against governance without courage
• Against diplomacy without dignity
• Against liberation without transformation
This work is not anti-state. Not anti-leadership. Not anti-history. It is anti-complacency. We did not write to be liked. We wrote to be unavoidable.
If comfort was interrupted and certainty unsettled, then the writings fulfilled their democratic obligation to sharpen choice, expose consequence, and remind all and sundry that silence is neither natural nor permanent.
The question is no longer whether the nation has been warned. The question is whether it is prepared to listen and whether, once again, those who cannot speak will be asked to absorb the cost of that refusal.
Conclusion
This is moral reflection. It is a reminder that freedom is incomplete while poverty, exclusion, and exploitation persist.
This is a call to action. A demand to honour history, confront the present, and shape a future we can all call our own.
This is the responsibility of memory. This is the discipline of liberation. This is the courage of a people who refuse to be quiet. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of our employers or this newspaper but are solely our personal views as citizens and Pan-Africanists.
